


When you close your eyes, is it hell you see?

by liminalweirdo



Series: Out of the suburbs, Into the city [1]
Category: Ginger Snaps (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, F/F, Female Friendship, Female-Centric, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, but still pretty gay, the cure works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:34:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23452531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/pseuds/liminalweirdo
Summary: Two lonely girls cobble together a tenuous relationship, but it isn't love. Not really. Not the way it's supposed to be. Or; Brigitte and Ghost seek refuge, for a little while.
Relationships: Brigitte Fitzgerald/Ghost
Series: Out of the suburbs, Into the city [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698400
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15
Collections: Fic Journal of the Plague Year





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place in a sort of alternate universe and begins about three years after the ending of the first film. It is set before my fic [If we were meant to be, we would've been by now](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20863922) but can definitely be read as a standalone, and it will deviate slightly. Many elements of Ginger Snaps: Unleashed apply.

~

" _Comics are very incoherent. Their makers send them out into the world unprepared for all the demons and enemies they'll face..."_ \- Ghost

Anyway, it starts with a nightmare. Kind of.

**~**

“I knew you’d find us, Alice.”

After she falls, Ghost can still feel the impact of the hammer against Alice’s skull, the way it jolted up her arms fast, but not as fast as the rush of adrenaline or fear or maybe even relief that followed it. She’s warm with it even though the house itself is cold. Those old vents never heated the place up as well as the woodstove did.

She picks up the rifle when something moves down there in the darkness. Brigitte’s hands aren’t her hands anymore, they’re heavier, broader than they were, and long black talons have burst from her fingertips, splitting skin apart to create something that can split skin apart. Ghost wishes she could layer the fragile, delicate fingers Brigitte has — _had_ — over the near-paw of this beast — overlay it like tissue paper so that she could see the similarities and differences. That sharp crinkle swish of a page as thin as a moth’s wing flicking back and forth, back and forth. And laid over Brigitte’s human fingers, over the beast’s clawed hand she could lay another thin page — onion-skin paper — of a human skeleton. Just one, two, three. 

Each page falls over the last like reverse transformation, like a whisper. Beast. Human. Bone. 

Brigitte drags herself up to the mouth of the basement door — until her skull kisses the metal muzzle of the rifle, and then she lays her temple against the rough wood just at the cusp of the trapdoor opening and whispers “Kill me.”

And Ghost pulls the trigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like this quarantine we're in, this story exists in kind of a liminal space, and I'm writing it for April 2020s NaNoWriMo, but whether or not it will reach 50k is debatable. I may also do a series of one-shots for [The constellations reveal themselves one star at a time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18683134) like I've been promising to do for MANY MOONS now.
> 
> Love you all and, as they say in Abel Township, stay safe out there. (And stay at home).


	2. Chapter 2

**GHOST**

  
Ghost claws to the surface of her dream like drowning, her arms flailing at nothing, at darkness. The scream building in her chest scrapes at her throat and sounds half-animal. Her hands are hot like she’s wrapped them around the metal barrel of the fired gun. Her palm connects with something, really cracks against it, but she’s blind. There’s a sound — not her own — and then a spark. A lighter clicks on.

“It’s _me_!” 

Brigitte’s eyes always look dark in the half-light, Dark stands of hair bisect her face, her mouth — dark — and open. “Ghost!” she’s saying, “ _Ghost_!” She’s holding the guttering flame in one hand, but the other hovers. Brigitte’s scared to touch her again, and Ghost’s palm is stinging. She’s starting to understand. She catches her breath a little too sharply. “Oh my god, did I hit you?”

Brigitte’s breathing fast, standing there at Ghost’s bedside, the looming darkness of the room behind her. Ghost realizes that the rhythm of her breathing almost matches her own and that’s strange, somehow — eerie, like they’re the same person, or like ten people could be standing in the shadows behind her there, just breathing with them — so she focuses on something else. Like the fact that Brigitte’s face is normal. Not wolfish, like it was…

“You were dreaming,” Brigitte says, just as Ghost asks “Was I dreaming?”

Their voices overlap, confused chorus, and then it’s just their breathing again. Ghost’s eyes flicker again to the shadows beyond. Her skin crawls, but the fear is fading, and when she looks back at Brigitte, Brigitte blinks and looks away.

“Did I hit you?” Ghost asks again, softer now, but just as anxious.

“It’s fine, you didn’t know,” Brigitte says. She’s looking away, eyes on the door to their shared bedroom. Her hair falls forward until Ghost can’t see her face. She’s listening. The halfway house they’re in is home to four girls. The two of them, and Winnie and Koral next door. Brigitte had this room all to herself for over a year, until Ghost showed up. And she kind of thinks that maybe Brigitte still resents that. The light in the hallway is still on, Ghost can see it through the keyhole that doesn’t have a key. None of the doors lock in this place, not even the bathrooms.

Ghost is half afraid that Brigitte will turn back to her and be the monster, and she huddles back against the cheap pressed-wood headboard until it knocks against the wall softly. But when Brigitte looks back at her, she’s just a girl. Now that Ghost’s eyes have adjusted everything looks a little bit more normal. She can distinguish the features of Brigitte’s face outside of just darkness and paleness. The room registers around her. The writing desk between their two beds, piled with library books and a cup of water that’s coloured this pale brownish lavender because she was using it to wet her watercolour pencils. The drawing itself sits on the desk with something heavy weighing down each corner — a stapler, a pile of paperbacks, a rock from someone’s garden, all keeping the paper from rippling and curling beneath the water in the ink. Ghost bites her lip. “I dreamt you turned into a monster,” she says. 

Brigitte tenses noticeably. “What kind of monster?” she finally asks, voice almost brittle in its dryness.

“A lycanthrope.” The word is still foreign to her. It’s a werewolf, but Brigitte doesn’t call it that.

Brigitte does something that isn’t quite an eyeroll, but the sentiment is there. She looks away and says, lowly, “I shouldn’t have told you.”

Ghost presses her lips together, feeling everything in her protest against that. She has to correct it, make it right. Every moment of every day of their friendship — because that’s what Ghost keeps insisting they are — she’s afraid that she’s not doing it right. But it’s hard to be friends with Brigitte. Brigitte’s hard, but Ghost likes her anyway. “I’m glad you did,” she says.

“So you can wake up screaming?”

Ghost feels herself flinch. She narrows her eyes. “I was screaming because in the dream, I shot you.”

Brigitte rakes her fingers through her hair, fingernails blunt, normal. “If I did turn into a monster, that’s what I’d expect you to do.”

Ghost frowns, then looks down, running a lock of pale blonde hair through the circle of her fingers and resists the urge to put the strand in her mouth and chew it. The others girls made fun of her for that, called her a baby. Not Brigitte, though. “I’d find you a cure,” Ghost says.

Brigitte twists her left arm out from her side a little and in the firelight a single, circular scar is dark and visible beneath the crook of her elbow. “Good thing I already took care of that,” she mumbles.

“Do you ever…” Ghost begins, but it takes her a moment to figure out how to finish. “Do you ever miss it? Like, the power or the strength, or—”

“No,” Brigitte says, quickly. “I never miss it.”

“But didn’t you feel free, even a little?”

Brigitte sighs softly through her nose, her head tipped down. Ghost waits, and after a moment, their eyes meet again. “I felt like everything I was was being ripped away from me, and I couldn’t stop it.”

Ghost huddles a little further down into the sheets. She’s cold, now that the fear is dissipating. Brigitte glances up at her movement. “Can I turn the light off?” she asks.

Ghost nods. The lighter clicks and they’re washed in darkness again. She hears Brigitte retreat, back to her own bed on the other side of the room and Ghost huddles down into her blankets again, pulling them up tight around her.

Both of them re-settle. Ghost is too awake to sleep, and as her eyes adjust, she can see the sharp line of Brigitte’s shoulder just peeking out above the blankets, a pale half-moon. She always seems impenetrable, unyielding, and Ghost doesn’t really know why.

But then, lots of the clinic girls are like that. She’d learned not to ask — she just watched and listened instead, but Brigitte’s different. It’s harder to help herself with Brigitte.

**BRIGITTE**

Brigitte tells herself that she doesn’t remember, anymore, when she started to care about Ghost. Come March, she will have been at the halfway house for three years, and Ghost only showed up here six months ago. It’s how fast she found herself befriending her that’s a testament to how lonely she was. Is. And that’s why she started to tell her things.

Before the halfway house, Brigitte was at the psychiatric clinic because she’d been broken, a little. On Halloween night, 1999, she’d climbed the stairs on wobbling legs like a sleepwalker, leaving the dead boy, and the wolf that was her sister down there in the darkness of the unfinished basement. She gathered what she needed and left the house, in all its destruction. It’s in pieces, like her life. She walked through the cold, misty morning to the greenhouse, which was empty of partiers, and trashed with cups and smells like beer and pot and not green things like she had been used to. She made the cure and injected herself, and then she made more just in case. She brought all the syringes she could find, but took nothing else of Sam’s. With a duffel bag of things — some clothes, her lighter, her journal, the contents of her parents’ change jar, and the materials for the cure, Brigitte stepped onto a bus and left Bailey Downs. She hitchhiked anywhere she could go that was as far away from there as possible and ended up in Alberta where she slipped further and further into a grief she couldn’t pull herself out of. She saw Ginger everywhere. Obsessively, she made cuts on her arms and her thighs and timed their healing, even though she knew without a shadow of a doubt, that any part of the wolf that had been inside her is gone, now. The cure worked. But she was too late. Ginger’s voice in her ear at night made Brigitte stop sleeping, even though she still rented motel rooms and hostels. Ginger’s face overlapped hers in too many water-spotted mirrors. Maybe she just got tired of dragging that blade over her arms, searching for something that was gone. A sister. A feeling. Any feeling at all. She injected the monkshood again like maybe she could get the traces of whatever is plaguing her out, but in an uninfected, fragile, human body it was pure poison. She’d collapsed in a snowbank somewhere, in a haze of panic and confusion, and woken up in the clinic where they treated her for suicidal tendencies, schizophrenia, and borderline. How could she tell them that it was PTSD; severe trauma. That she’d lived through a crisis, somehow. 

Somehow. 

In the end, she figured out that she was going to have to get better if she was ever getting out of there. It took just over a year, and then they’d released her to the halfway house under the condition that she finish high school. 

Brigitte has never fit in with others, and Winnie and Koral down the hall aren't an exception. Not like that’s a surprise or anything. At least they’re not the Trinas of the world. Sometimes they can be almost tolerable, but she’s just glad she doesn’t room with them, because _they_ usually end up dissolving into screaming fights at least once a week. They can erupt from anywhere: the bathroom, the kitchen. Brigitte’s gotten used to the sudden explosion of raised voices from the relative quiet, just the drone of the TV or the radio in the background. At least it doesn’t set all her nerves alight anymore. The first time it happened she half expected them both to emerge soaked in blood, some huge dark creature burning behind them, just seconds from tearing them apart. Now she barely lefts her pencil from the page of her journal when the shrieking starts.

She told herself forever that she hated sharing this room with another girl — especially one two years younger than her. But Ghost is often quiet once she finally chatters herself out. When she’s absorbed in her drawings or her comics. And she likes Brigitte even though Brigitte has no earthly idea why. The funny thing, is that it’s easier to sleep when she can hear Ghost breathing. 

Or maybe that’s not so funny at all. But she tries not to think too hard about Ginger anymore.

~

Ghost will turn seventeen on April 19th. Brigitte knows this because when she turned nineteen this part September, Ghost had pinned her with that smile at the supper table that evening — all braces and bright eyes — and said “My birthday’s on the 19th, too.”

Winnie had looked up from her writing and asked “Wait, _today_?” and Ghost had said “No, April.” and Koral had thrown a wet dish cloth at her, still soaked in suds and said “That’s not the same thing, you fucking simpleton.”

Brigitte remembers how Ghost’s smile had flickered out as she’d wiped soap foam off of her cheek. It flecked her hair, making the blonde look butter-yellow. Brigitte always thinks of Ghost’s hair as white until she sees it contrasted with something that is. She remembers the twist in her gut she’d felt — the same as when Trina had pushed her down at field hockey — and how Ghost had just kind of shrunk into herself, vacantly smiling down at the table because she just takes it, that kind of abuse. And Brigitte knows what that feels like. 

So she got up and picked up the dish cloth from the floor and threw it into the sink, narrowly missing Koral. “You’re making a mess,” she said.

Koral sputtered “Fuck!” and fished it out of the sink. “That was on the floor, I’m trying to _clean_ those,” and then rounded on Brigitte and said “If it wasn’t your birthday I’d throttle you.”

“Lucky me.” Brigitte opened the back door and stepped out into the night.

That wasn’t the first time she stood up for Ghost, either. She sees too much of herself in her, maybe, and Ghost seems a lot younger than Brigitte felt at her age. When _she_ was sixteen she was trying to figure out how to cure lycanthropy, and then she’d killed her sister. Or what was left of her. At a glance, Ghost’s sixteen is comic books about superheroes and drawing pictures, and a plethora of imaginings she’s just now learning to separate from reality. She seems a lot younger, in her mannerisms and her clothes — she’s Easter egg bright — but Brigitte knows better, now: That Ghost’s sixteen, really, is two years in a clinic for behavioural issues under her belt, her stint there being the only reason she stayed out of juvie, or someplace worse, for lighting her grandmother, Barbara, on fire. Ghost’s sixteen is years of neglect and abuse from that same grandmother, both her parents dead, and a regimented schedule of therapy and school. Ghost’s sixteen is taking care of burnt Barbara for forty-three days all alone in some cabin in the Canadian wilderness before the police showed up.

She was fourteen when she set the fire, Brigitte knows. Ghost told her one night after she had some kind of panic attack that started with a question: _Do you smell something burning?_ and her increasing hysteria when the other girls kept saying they didn’t. 

“Jesus, she’s losing her fucking mind,” Koral had said, but it was Brigitte that followed Ghost up to their room and talked her down, and told her all about the strange things that minds could conjure up, that stress could do to the body. And there, both of them sitting criss-cross, facing one another on Ghost’s bed like they were about to conduct a séance, Ghost told her about the night of the fire. About the way Barbara had tried to give Ghost counseling on her own, but it was all Freudian, reverse psychology, and withholding affection. It was neglect and an unwillingness to believe Ghost when she said the food Barbara provided made her feel sick.

Ghost is allergic to gluten. By the time the police made their way out to that cabin she was clinically underweight, and had been for years because she was sick all the time. Barbara thought she was doing it to herself. The only time she got attention from Barbara was when Barbara stood over her at mealtime and made sure she ate everything on her plate.

“I thought,” Ghost had told her, “she was poisoning me. So I tried to stop her. I searched the whole house for what she was using. I started secretly measuring all the cleaning supplies, and the rat poison. I used to put towels over the vents in my room, and under the door at night, because I thought maybe she was trying to poison me with carbon monoxide. So my room was freezing every night because the poison couldn’t get in but then the heat couldn't, either. But, I thought that was why I felt like I was going crazy. Carbon monoxide poisoning does all kinds of weird things to your mind, you know? I didn’t even know what gluten _was_ until I went to the clinic and Tyler figured it out...? I know I sound totally crazy.”

Ghost swallowed, fingers tapping out this chaotic rhythm against her bare leg. Brigitte can see her pulse jumping there at the inside of her ankle, the skin almost translucent. Brigitte doesn't think she sounds crazy. She thinks that being all alone in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, in an environment like the one Barbara created... she thought that might have done all kinds of messed up things to a person's mind. "I set Barbara on fire," Ghost told her. Whispered it into the little distance between them. "And I didn't put her out. It took twenty-seven minutes for it to burn out on its own." She'd looked up at Brigitte with fear in her eyes, waiting for judgement or retribution, but what Brigitte remembers is that she’d wanted to touch her, then. Maybe even hug her, but the thought was so overwhelming that she didn’t. The last person she’d ever put her arms around was her sister. That was the _only_ person she'd ever wanted to put her arms around, until that moment.

She didn't, of course. But she had to give her something, maybe. All that honestly and vulnerability, all of that trust that Ghost had just laid out between them, risking the possibility that whatever they had built up might be whisked away in the blink of an eye, depending on what Brigitte thought of her now. But Brigitte knows what it feels like to lose people. “I’ll tell you,” Brigitte said softly, “something that sounds totally crazy.”

And so she did. In the place of touch, she offered something else. Something of hers. And it turned out that Ghost was pretty good at keeping secrets. 

Later, Brigitte maybe regretted it. Telling a girl whose imagination threatened to overtake her reality at the best of times that there were creatures that existed at the fringes of the suburbs, waiting to tear people up, change them into something totally else… telling her that she had lost her sister to one, and could have become one herself, if she hadn’t had the cure.

“Wolfsbane,” Ghost had whispered, rapt with attention.

“Close. It was monkshood. The same family.” 

_It’s perennial, it grows everywhere, but only in the spring…_

She doesn’t think about Sam anymore, though, either. Like Ginger, he’s more or less off limits in her mind.

Before telling her, she’d wondered how she could prove it to Ghost. The existence of lycanthropes. All she has as evidence, _real_ evidence, is a blurry polaroid that could be of anything. A dog, maybe. A bear. Just not human. But Ghost believed her anyway, and in the end Brigitte didn’t have to worry about proving anything to her at all. And maybe Brigitte needed just… to not be alone in this anymore. As much as she doesn’t want to believe it, she was never good at being alone. She was much better at being an extension of Ginger. After she saw the picture, Ghost drew werewolves for a couple of weeks, all these different variations and angles. None of them looked right. Not like what Brigitte knows they really look like.

“Why,” she’d asked her once, “do you always draw them on two legs?”

“That’s how they walk,” Ghost had responded. “Isn’t it?” And just like that the conversation had tipped straight into the surreal. It was like the world rippled and shifted, and they were the only ones in it. Reality settled, but things were different now, and maybe only they had noticed. Ghost had only said “Oh,” but she stopped drawing them after that. It clicked for her, then, that this wasn’t just a fairy tale. Not for Brigitte. 

They don’t really talk about it anymore. They just keep it somewhere, secret, between them. And there’s something that Brigitte desperately needed, in Ghost’s unshakeable belief in what she told her.

They were friends after that. At least that’s what Ghost kept calling them until Brigitte finally relented. It still feels strange, sometimes, to have a friend. She keeps trying to remind herself that she isn’t necessarily going to lose this one like she’s lost the others.


	3. Chapter 3

**GHOST**

“Mail for you,” Ghost says as she steps into their room. Brigitte’s sitting crosslegged on her bed, writing in her journal again. Ghost hasn’t seen her all afternoon. She drops two envelopes onto Brigitte’s bed, and then sits down in the desk chair, spinning it idly. Brigitte doesn’t even look up from the page.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” she asks. The chair squeaks softly as she twists it back and forth, her tennis shoes hooked over one of the metal legs at the bottom. She read the addresses on them when she’d picked them up. They’re both from schools further east. Provinces away. Ghost isn’t exactly sure how many, but she knows it’s not exactly a day trip. “They’re both big…” she presses, because there’s this itch under her skin she can’t seem to scratch. “That means you got in, right? They send small envelopes when you’re rejected.”

“I think that’s just in movies, Ghost.”

“How much did it cost?” Ghost asks. “Applying to schools?”

“Four hundred and seventy-five dollars,” Brigitte says and Ghost pulls a quick grimace of sympathy, even though Brigitte still isn’t looking at her. She’s also, Ghost can’t help but notice, not looking at the envelopes. “Where did you apply again?”

“Toronto. B.C….”

“I’ve always wanted to see the ocean,” Ghost says, eyes drifting to the window. The curtain is drawn across it but it’s blue and sheer, so the light still comes in, only slightly diffused. “UBC rejected me,” Brigitte says.

“That’s stupid.”

Brigitte shrugs.

“Are you scared? I’ll open them for you,” Ghost says.

“Fine,” Brigitte tells her, and Ghost reaches for one and it’s ever so slight, but she sees Brigitte’s writing hand falter a little. She’s curious.

Ghost rips the first envelope open messily. “York accepted you,” she tells her, reading on. “You’re applying to the science program, huh? What do you want to be?”

“Employable,” Brigitte responds, dryly.

Ghost sets the acceptance letter on the desk and reaches for the other one, pulling one leg up onto the chair as she rips it open as well. It’s kind of exciting to open mail. She never gets any. “University of Toronto accepted you, too.”

Brigitte looks up, then reaches out. Ghost hands it to her and watches her read the acceptance herself.

**BRIGITTE**

Her heart’s beating hard. Applying to university scared her, it always has. It’s always been something she wanted to do that Ginger didn’t, and so she never brought it up. It wasn’t until coming here, to the halfway house that she finally decided to do it, with Dr. Brookner’s impassioned insistence. The schools she suggested were impressive ones. UBC, UofT. There were even some in the states she’d brought up, but the price of being an international student had made Brigitte want to throw up, even with a partial scholarship, so she never applied. UBC had rejected her, as had McGill. She’d applied for a BSc for each of the schools, and now, there were the only two schools she’d chosen saying yes, both in Ontario.

It would be closer to Bailey Downs than she’d been in almost five years. Closer to a lot of things she’d rather not think about. Her mom, in prison. Henry, god knows where. The house she grew up in.

“So this means you’re leaving,” Ghost says, almost startling her. Brigitte looks up.

“I can’t stay here forever.”

“Yeah,” Ghost answers. “I know.”

Brigitte reaches for the letter from York, putting them both together and slipping them into her journal before she closes it, puts it in a drawer.

“You know, I thought about going to school in Toronto, too,” Ghost says, suddenly, in the way that says that she might be lying.

“Oh, yeah?” Brigitte asks.

“Yeah, the Ontario College of Art and Design. I want to be an illustrator.”

Brigitte’s suddenly not sure if she’s caught Ghost in a lie or not. Maybe this is just an admission, one she hasn’t said out loud yet. Brigitte’s eyes wander to her drawings, scattered across the desk — some of them pinned to the wall. They’re good. She knows nothing about comic books, but the drawings themselves… “You should,” Brigitte tells her.

“Yeah,” Ghost says. “Maybe.”

**GHOST**

She really means to. To apply to OCAD, to figure out a way to follow Brigitte to Toronto, but things, as they do for Ghost, get all jumbled up into chaos. She graduates high school in June like she expected to, and then it’s one blissful month of freedom (not counting therapy) before Dr. Brookner insists on her getting a summer job. Ghost applies and applies, but she can’t find one, and all of a sudden, it’s Winnie’s twenty-first birthday and she moves out of the halfway house and into a real-person apartment and there’s preparations for that and then all at once at the end of July, all of Brigitte’s things are suddenly packed up and ready to go, and Ghost’s finally received a letter of her own.

A new girl is coming to take Brigitte’s place. She's closer to Ghost’s age, the letter says, and Ghost suddenly wants nothing to do with any of this anymore. For her, the halfway house always felt safe. Free. No more clinic meals of questionable meat and Jell-o. No more orderlies and no more Barbara eyeing her warily through her bandages. She felt almost normal here, and she had a space to draw in a room that wasn’t locked at night. She could come and go as she pleased. Now that she’s done high school, the only thing keeping her here is the fact that the rent is free, and Brigitte.

Or it was.

**BRIGITTE**

In the end, she picked UofT. She’s leaving tomorrow morning. The house is strange and quiet with Winnie gone. Koral has no one to argue with, and has taken to appearing wherever Brigitte is, and it’s not that she minds her being around, Koral’s not a chatterbox like Ghost is, but it’s not like they’ve ever particularly gotten along either. Still, Brigitte misses solitude and the way things were before. She has to leave before the new girl comes and she’s fine with that. She has no desire to make nice with someone she’s never going to see again. She doesn’t want to know who’s going to be taking her place. It’ll just be someone else once this girl’s gone. Endless streams of young women trampled and forgotten by the system.

She’s barely seen Ghost, which is weird. She’s grown so used to her presence, like a little blonde shadow, sometimes. Sometimes she wonders if this is how Ginger felt. At least for Ginger, though, Brigitte knew when to be quiet. Ghost doesn’t. But then again, Brigitte’s more patient than Ginger was, too. Brigitte tries her best not to compare her relationshp with Ghost to her relationship with her sister, but it happens anyway. She knows what she and Ginge had was different, she knows that, feels it in every part of herself, but it’s the only thing she’s got as a reference point.

Sometimes she wishes it were easier. Sometimes she _hates_ herself for wishing.

She’s rented a car to drive to Toronto because it’s the easiest option. There’s a drop off point there, and the car has enough space for all her things. It’s just three boxes, even after three years in one place. Mostly books and clothes and a camera she picked up because it looked so much like the 35mm she left back home. She’s never put any film inside it. She doesn’t now what she’d photograph anymore, but somehow it’s comforting to have, in a way. It’s just a familiar thing to touch.

Speaking of that car, though, she’s been on hold for fifty-one minutes waiting to get something straightened out. She never received a confirmation and when she called to make sure it was still fine to pick up tomorrow, they couldn’t find her registration. This is so typical of Canada that she can only be annoyed that she waited until the evening before to call in and make sure things were still a go. She wonders if she could get paid for doing other people’s jobs for them, since she’d had to do it so often since leaving the clinic. She wonders if it’s like this in other places in the world, too, and hopes desperately that it isn’t. A lifetime of this seems exhausting.

An irate woman answers, different from the woman she was speaking to when she was put on hold and she has to explain her entire situation again. She’s just about got everything sorted, the bubble of panic in her throat fading as they square things away, when the lights shifts, and Brigitte looks up to see Ghost in the doorway. She looks lost and young with her hair wet from the bath, hanging around her shoulders. Brigitte holds her eyes and feel that panic swell up inside her all over again. She barely hears the rest of what the woman says, and then she hangs up.

“What,” she asks Ghost, voice tight with trepidation.

Ghost doesn’t answer for a second, her eyes on Brigitte’s boxed up things, and then she smiles at her, genuinely, brightly, and says “I don’t want you to go,” before something in her face crumples and she’s crying so suddenly that Brigitte doesn’t have a hope of keeping up.

She scoffs without meaning to be mean. It’s more that she’s surprised. She climbs off of the bed and goes to her, half reaching, but doesn’t touch. “Sorry,” Ghost says through her sobs.

“What’s wrong with her?”

Brigitte looks up. Koral’s appeared at the top of the steps, watching them both suspiciously.

“Nothing, she’s fine,” Brigitte says. She draws Ghost inside and shuts the door softly before turning to her. “Ghost…” she says.

“I just thought— this is all at once. It's so fast, and I don’t want to room with the new girl, and I can’t find a stupid job, and — and _you’re_ the only friend I’ve made here.”

Brigitte pulls a face like _don’t be stupid,_ Ghost has made friends. Only she makes friends with strange things like the neighbourhood cats and the guy that comes in to do maintenance that looks like he has no idea that it’s any later than 1967.

“I want to go with you,” Ghost says. She wipes her face, leaving faint red pressure marks on her cheeks where her fingers were.

And Brigitte’s first instinct is to say no. There’s always a reason to say no. Back in Bailey Downs they had to straighten things away with Trina before she and Ginger could skip town. When Sam asked her to leave with him, she flat out refused.

Sometimes she thinks that he’d still be alive, if she just…

There’s always a reason not to blow, unless she’s alone. She wonders what good that’s ever gotten her.

Sometimes she looks at Ghost and sees herself. The last time she, Brigitte, cried like this was the year Ginger did grade nine without her; high school. And Brigitte left alone in grade eight with kids that turned positively feral the second she couldn’t stand in her sister’s protective shadow.

She looks at Ghost and thinks that there’s no real reason to say no. She’s finished high school. She’s looking for work without any luck. Maybe she’ll have more luck in another province.

Brigitte turns away and picks up the phone again. Behind her, Ghost’s sniffling, wiping her nose on the inside of her shirt collar. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“You have to ask Dr. Brookner,” Brigitte says. “You have to do it now, because I’m leaving in the morning. At like four-thirty, so…”

~

Dr. Brookner doesn't like it at first. Ghost is only just seventeen. Brigitte stands against the desk in their room, watching Ghost try to argue her case over the phone, sitting on Brigitte’s bed, but when things started piling up against her, she gets up to pace the room, back and forth, winding the phone cord around and around her fingers until it starts to stretch the coils out. Finally, Brigitte reaches out and takes the phone away.

“Eleanor,” Brigitte says, because Dr. Brookner’s been her therapist, too. Brigitte knows her, knows her concerns and just where she can be pressed. “Haven’t you been telling Ghost she needs to make friends and get out of her head? We’re just changing cities, that’s all. If she comes with me, we can look out for each other. Also, you know she does better with me than she ever has with any of the other girls. This way we have a support network…”

**GHOST**

Brigitte sets the phone down a little while later. It’s gotten dark enough that Ghost has had to flick the desk lamp on. Her cheeks feel raw, but she’s stopped crying. She can’t hear what Dr. Brookner’s saying, and Brigitte’s face is hidden in her hair as she listens. She shakes it back now, and meets Ghost’s eyes.

“You better pack,” Brigitte says. “Anything that isn’t ready I’m making you leave it behind.”

Ghost doesn’t even think before she throws her arms around her. Brigitte’s pushed back by the weight of it and Ghost stumbles. They both reach out to support themselves against Brigitte’s mattress, and Ghost can feel how stiff she’s gone beneath her touch. She pulls away faster than she wants too, practically bouncing with excitement. Brigitte looks like she’s second guessing herself already, so Ghost spins away to start putting things into her suitcase.

**BRIGITTE**

Ghost looks, Brigitte thinks, like Anne of Green Gables, standing in the driveway that morning, after Brigitte's picked up the rent-a-car. It's barely sunrise, and she's wearing her pale hair in braids, clutching her suitcase handle in both hands. It’s held together with different coloured bits of yarn The fake leather’s peeled off to reveal a soft fabric skin. It takes some doing, but they finally get all the Brigitte’s boxes, and Ghost’s suitcase, one garbage bag of clothes, and about ten thousand sobeys bags full of art supplies (that Brigitte sincerely doubts will keep the paints from getting everywhere, but there it is) into the tiny little Nissan. It’s got to be good enough. They’re running late already.

Ghost twists in her seat, clutching the headrest to look back at the house as Brigitte pulls out onto the street. “Do you think you’ll miss it?” she asks.

“Not in the slightest,” Brigitte tells her, and she thinks she means it.

She doesn’t really think she misses places. Not like other people do, but there’s one thing she does know, and it’s this: the weight she’s gotten so used to carrying around in her chest these past few months in preparation for leaving — it’s practically gone now.

It’s just that she always imagined herself driving with the passenger seat empty, and that never felt entirely right to her.

So maybe it could’ve been anyone. Anyone else fiddling with the radio until they find April Wine’s Oowatanite, of all things and leave it on. (Brigitte crinkles her nose in distaste). Anyone else whose fluttering hands and tumbling words cut through the silence.

Or maybe not.


	4. Chapter 4

**BRIGITTE**

Neither of them have a passport, so there’s no option to drive through the States. It only, Ghost reasons, would have saved them a couple of hours anyway. They make it to Manitoba the first day. There was something freeing about escaping Alberta. Everything there felt like a prison, anyway. The halfway house was better than the clinic, but only marginally. Her whole body hurts by that evening. They’ve eaten mostly gas station food in an effort to save money. Ghost doesn’t have anything, and Brigitte’s running entirely off her earnings from part time jobs she'd picked up here and there. It isn’t much, but she wasn’t paying rent either, so it should be enough to survive until they get set up in Toronto.

Thinking about that city now twists her stomach. Toronto’s big — bigger than anywhere else she’s ever lived. She thinks it will definitely _feel_ bigger than Edmonton which doesn’t even have a million people in it. Fuck. What’s she getting herself into?

“Have you ever lived in the city?” Ghost asks her. They’re sharing a club sandwich across from one another in a cheap booth at a family restaurant that’s practically empty. The waitress’s name is Yvonne and she’s abandoned them long ago, as soon as she realized they weren’t really buying two people’s worth of food. The coffee tastes like dishwater. Brigitte drinks it anyway, hoping it will dull her headache. She isn’t used to staring at the road all day.

“No,” she says. “Not other than Edmonton.” She doesn’t ask Ghost, knows that Ghost will answer her anyway, which she does. She’s spent her whole life in Alberta, too. Her grandmother’s cabin was somewhere in the Boreal Forest and she’d spent most what she could remember of her childhood there.

“What happened to your parents?” Brigitte asks her, reaching out to stop Ghost from dumping vinegar all over the fries. Ghost relents and Brigitte separates the fries into even halves with her knife and spins the plate to claim one half for herself. Ghost coats her own with enough vinegar that Brigitte can smell it, bright and sharp. It tastes like copper, in the air. Like licking a rusted chainlink fence.

Ghost makes a face. “Barbara never told me. I don’t really remember them.”

“Did you ever try to find out?”

Ghost shrugs. “I used to imagine it. Like a car accident, or a murder-suicide.” A couple passing them gives them a strange look and Brigitte twists her mouth to stop the smile. It’s not funny, she knows that, but there’s something familiar — comfortingly macabre about talking about things like that.

“When I was younger, my sister and I would take death pictures,” she says. “All these different ways we could have ended it.”

Ghost is watching her, frozen with her fork poised over her soggy fries. She doesn’t move, like an animal trying not to spook its prey. Brigitte swallows, blinks down at the table. “We did this school project once called Life in Bailey Downs, and it was just all these… like crime scene photos and…”

“Do you still have them? The pictures?”

“No,” Brigitte says. “I left them at my house.”

“We should go back and get them.”

“I don’t think so, Ghost,” Brigitte says.

“Well, but why? Your parents are still there, right?”

“Probably not.” Pamela’s in prison. Henry… who knows. “It’s probably all gone now.” She has a pretty good idea what people would have thought about them. She still remembers the reaction in class that day, back when the biggest thing they had to worry about was getting bullied by the Trinas or not being able to escape one of Pamela’s 'Girl Talks.' She doesn’t miss it, but it’s something close. The thing was, was that she thought those pictures were beautiful, in a weird, morbid way. Ginger’s were beautiful.

Brigitte sighs and half wishes she didn’t bring it up, but Ghost sometimes has a way of getting her talking. Kind of like… well, not like Sam, because that was all folklore and conjecture, but… maybe a little bit like that.

She doesn’t want to think about Sam, either. All these things that are lost, now. She wonders who found…

She squeezes her eyes shut and pinches the bridge of her nose, the pain from her headache turning the food in her stomach unpleasantly.

“Let me drive tomorrow,” Ghost says.

“You don’t have a license.”

“I don’t need one. I’ve never gotten caught.”

Brigitte makes a face.

"It's _prairies_ , Brigitte, it's basically just driving straight. 

“You know that the cops would seriously be the _last_ thing we need,” Brigitte says.

“I promise I’ll be really careful.”

**GHOST**

They rent a little motel room that probably doesn’t have bedbugs and that, she thinks, is when it really starts to sink in. That she’s doing this, _they’re_ doing this. She’s never been on a roadtrip, and she almost says that out loud to Brigitte, but Brigitte’s busy, sitting with one leg folded beneath her on one of the beds, going through her bag. Ghost, on the other hand, doesn’t have anything to do, so she sits down on the other bed, bounces a little.

“So what happens when we get to Toronto?” Ghost asks.

“We have to find somewhere to live before we can do anything else,” Brigitte says. “It’s hard to get work without an address.”

Ghost nods. “I hope I can find a job out there,” she says, but Brigitte doesn’t respond. Sometimes in the beginning, she would get this feeling like Brigitte was mad at her, but she’s learned in the last few months that that’s not usually the case. She’s just a quiet person. Withdrawn. Ghost has been trying to learn when she should and shouldn’t say things. Most people think Ghost talks too much, so she tries to give people space. Especially Brigitte, and especially when they were sharing a bedroom. But she always wants to know more about her. Brigitte, she thinks, gives so little of herself, that Ghost feels special whenever she’s offered anything. She knows for a fact that she knows more than anyone else alive knows about her. That’s special. That’s something that friends have, she’s read about it in books.

“So like what kind of place are we going to look for?” she asks.

“Probably something small. I dunno, Ghost. A room, maybe. We’ll figure it out.”

“How much money are we going to have left?”

Brigitte sighs and looks up. “More if we can get there by tomorrow. Less if we get there on Monday.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, I was going to sleep in the car,” Brigitte responds. “Until we had to put all of your stuff in it, too. Now there's no room.”

**BRIGITTE**

“Oh,” Ghost responds, softly. “Well— well, we could still sleep in the car, we can just— we can re-arrange things, put things in the front seat at night, and then—“

“It’s fine, Ghost,”

“I know you can park in Wal-Mart parking lots,” Ghost continues. “RVers do it all the time, we could—”

“Really. Ghost. It’s okay… just… we’ll be fine as long as the car doesn’t break down or something. I’m going to shower.”

She takes the clean clothes she’s pulled out of her bag into the bathroom with her and shuts the door, shuts Ghost out. She doesn’t feel good — something’s been eating away at her since the diner. Every hour they get closer to Ontario, it seems to be growing, these shadows in her periphery, this foreboding feeling creeping into her margins. She doesn’t even know why she wants to go back there, just that she’d felt this pull. Not for the place — she’s never been to Toronto — it’s not even nostalgia, it’s something else. Something she doesn’t entirely understand. It just… everything worked out so that it was the path of least resistance, and she wanted that city more than she wanted the others. She doesn’t even know why.

Her hands shake as she turns on the shower. Something’s wrong, and her mind’s starting to sound just like static buzzing as she forces herself to see only what’s directly in front of her and not the places her mind’s trying to go.

She undresses and steps under the showerhead. The temperature of the water fluctuates, almost too hot, almost cold, but she doesn’t move from underneath it. She feels it soak through her hair to the back of her neck, and tendrils of it slide forward into her face as the water pressure pounds unevenly down onto her skin. She shuts her eyes, but that makes it worse. She feels like she’s being spun around and around inside of her head, blindfolded. The floor pitches a little and she opens her eyes, one arm flying out to catch herself before she falls. She didn’t eat in time, her blood sugar must be low. She can feel grime on the wall beneath the pads of her fingers, but she hangs on, presses her hand into the wall to steady herself. Something else is crowding in on her. This sound, rhythmic. Sort of scraping. This gaspgaspgasp for air. There’s a flickering at the edges of her vision like sunspots, like little flashing lights. Like heat off of a desert road. “Shit,” she whispers, and squeezes her eyes shut to block it out. It sparks there in the darkness behind her eyelids, the aura of a migraine, and behind that, against the darkness of her eyelids, is Sam’s face, barely coming together in the flickering darkness, because he’s half awash in dark, too. The darkness of her basement and of his own blood. Soaked in it. He met her eyes like he thought she would save him.

She remembers exactly how his blood tasted. Brigitte retches, and everything fades away. The sound of his dying breaths, the smell of blood and something sharper off of him — bile. Ginger had ripped him open, torn him up. Nothing comes up but her own stringy liquid saliva and she spits it onto the floor of the tub. The water washes it away.

She wonders what happened to him after she left. She remembers stepping past him in the hallway, everything packed into her duffle bag. She’d kept her face turned away from him, almost sliding along the wall to create as much distance as she could.

And she wonders how long he was left down there; if Henry found him. She thinks even dead people might feel lonely.

The flickering lights have faded, but the headache pain’s setting in by the time she comes out with her hair wet and tied back. Ghost is sitting against her headboard, watching TV with no volume.

“Do you have any painkillers?” Brigitte asks.

“Yeah,” Ghost springs off the bed with more energy than Brigitte can even fathom at the moment, and she just stands helplessly while Ghost rummages through her bag. And then suddenly she’s right in front of her, two little red Tylenol in the palm of her hand. They look like beads of blood against her skin.

~

By morning, the migraine’s faded to a dull throbbing ache. She didn’t sleep much, and the pain still threatens to overwhelm her, so she lets Ghost drive. To her credit, she’s a pretty good driver, and Brigitte actually manages to sleep a little, again, tucked against the passenger side window with her arm up as a pillow.

She wakes up when they stop for gas, sitting up quickly. The pain is much more manageable now, but she’s desperately hungry in a way she wasn’t most of yesterday.

“Hey, you slept a lot,” Ghost says, and Brigitte leans forward in her seat to try to figure out where they are, but it’s just a generic gas station.

“Where are we?”

“Thunder Bay, I think,” Ghost says. “Ontario. We passed the border a couple hours ago.” Brigitte sits back in her seat and watches Ghost go in to pay. She gets out as Ghost heads back, tells her, “Switch with me,” and they swap seats in the car. Brigitte drives them to their next motel where one of the mattresses has a mysterious stain, so they share one bed, lying side by side and staring up the motel ceiling.

“Did you ever hear that ghost story about the people that kept smelling something weird in their motel room?” Ghost asks. “And they keep complaining to the front desk, but no one can find the smell until they check under the beds? And there’s this corpse there that’s been dead for weeks, and people sleeping in the bed above. No one ever found out who it was.”

Brigitte looks over at her. “Isn’t that an urban legend?”

Ghost meets her eyes — one is amber-gold and the other impossibly dark, because of the way the light from behind her illuminates her face. Her hair, loose around her face, casts a hazy white halo before she rolls over fast and dangles off the side of the bed to check beneath it. Brigitte almost cracks a smile.

“Ugh, there’s stuff under here.”

Ghost doesn’t emerge and she doesn’t clarify. After a moment Brigitte rolls her eyes and leans over the other side.

“Hey,” Ghost says, upside-down across a sea of dust-bunnies and mysterious refuse. There’s candy wrappers, maybe, and something that looks like the thin plastic seal of a cigarette pack. Ghost reaches and pulls something out and they both twist back up onto the bed to look at what she’s found.

It’s a used contact lens, they both realize at the same time. Brigitte recoils a little and Ghost moves to flick it away but it falls onto the mattress between them. She _shrieks_ and Brigitte feels her breath catch somewhere in her throat, somewhere between startled and hilarity. It happens so fast, and they both launch themselves away from it like it’s contaminated. Ghost literally falls off the bed and Brigitte swipes the contact off of the mattress so that it lands on the floor, somewhere.

Ghost is cackling with laughter when Brigitte looks up. She is so free with it that Brigitte can see the elastic bands that stretch from her top braces to the bottom ones and she feels her breath catch. Ginger used to laugh like that. Brigitte doesn’t know if she ever did. She ties to shake it off. Ghost is holding her hands in front of her like they’re covered in hazardous waste and Brigitte finally, almost laughs. “Go wash your hands,” she tells her.

While the water runs, Brigitte finds a kleenex to throw the offending contact lens away. Her stomach growls, but all they picked up for supper was chips and some day-old banana chocolate chip muffins from the gas station. They eat it sitting crosslegged on the bed, sharing the bag of chips which is salt and vinegar and burns the edges of Brigitte’s mouth. She hates vinegar.

“I can’t understand your obsession with vinegar,” she tells her. “It’s basically a cleaning product. Just ethanol and sugar.”

**GHOST**

It’s nice, she thinks, sharing a bed. She’s a lot warmer than she was in the last hotel, and although Brigitte sleeps curled up with her back to her, facing the wall, Ghost feels safer than she did sleeping alone. Even though the rest of the room feels dark and expansive. She realizes that she forgot to check underneath the other bed for dead bodies. She keeps her eyes shut, afraid of what she’ll see if she opens them. She wriggles herself back across the mattress little by little until she feels Brigitte’s spine against her own. She pulls the sheets up over her head and tries to match their breathing.

~

She dreams she’s back in the clinic, only this time something’s chasing her through the hallways. She doesn’t know where she is at first, some of the corridors look like the house she grew up in. Her childhood bedroom, only the window has bars. Some of the hallways look like the abandoned section, near the crematorium. She goes down one set of steps, then another and tries to remember how many flights below ground the abandoned section went. She’s sure there weren’t this many levels before.

Down, down she goes. Something happens to the sound down here, until she can’t hear her own footsteps. She realizes all at once that she’s barefoot, and the cement floors are ice cold on her feet. Painful.

But everything is silent. Even her breathing sounds muffled, like she has water in her ears. This this dull thudding somewhere far away that she thinks might be her heartbeat. And then someone screams

_"RUN!"_

She turns sharply and comes face to face with a monster. A wolf. She thinks the voice came from the animal, although how an animal that size could sound so human she doesn’t know. It lunges. It sinks its teeth into her flesh.

**BRIGITTE**

Brigitte shakes Ghost awake somewhere between the darkest hour and the morning. Ghost comes to, screaming and Brigitte has to find her mouth, blind, and press her fingers over it. “Ghost,” she’s saying, “Ghost, Ghost, Ghost, Ghost,”

Ghost’s hits her in the chest, just above her heart and Brigitte feels her voice hitch, the air forced from her lungs. “Hey,” she says, half-chokes it. Ghost is half-crying on every inhale. Brigitte wraps her arms around her. She's realizes it's the first time she's ever really touched her like this. Close. “Shh. Shh.”

And gradually she settles. In the silence that follows, Brigitte finds herself rocking with her, every so slightly. It’s barely there, almost just the rhythm of her heartbeat, the blood beating through her veins that orchestrates the movement. She rocks her and listens for footsteps for voices outside, but no heard. Or if they did, no one’s coming.

She pulls away and wipes white hair and tears away from Ghost’s face.

“I was dreaming,” Ghost says.

“Tell me,” Brigitte answers.

~

They make it to Sudbury by the next evening and decide to stop again for the night. That evening at the third motel is much quieter, except for the hooting and hollering boys a couple doors down. It’s someone’s twenty-first birthday. She knows because periodically they’ll yell twenty _-one_ , as if age is anything other than a number. As if it means anything at all.

_… Out by sixteen, or dead in this scene…_

Then it’s just three hours to Toronto if they leave early enough to beat rush hour traffic. They sleep early in separate beds. If they dreamt, neither of them remembers come morning.


	5. Chapter 5

**BRIGITTE**

The apartment is in a five-story walk-up from the turn of the nineteenth century and obviously used to be a house, not apartments. It’s not uniform enough — not just a big four-sided box that holds people inside and only ever feeds them sunlight from the one direction their windows happen to face. The apartment they’re looking at is 3B, which stands halfway down a dark little corridor on a landing with a flickering ceiling light. There’s faint sounds of other people, elsewhere. It smells like cooking.

The woman showing them the apartment already has other appointments for this place set up. Brigitte knows they definitely can’t afford much more, and if they sign for this place, it will be under the assumption that Ghost gets work. Needless to say, Brigitte’s terrified, and doesn’t have any more motel money. Even if it’s not here, they need to find something soon.

The door opens to a hallway for shoes and coats and then opens expansively to a living room with huge windows. Brigitte knows the size of those windows, the large space — all that will make it cold as hell in winter. The kitchen is separated from the living room by a half-wall. Brigitte passes it, moves towards the far door where sunlight is spilling onto the floor, bleaching the dark, creaking, uneven floorboards. It’s a bedroom, she thinks, or it could be. It’s just a small space, compared to the vastness of the living room. Just enough space for a bed and a dresser. A closet with its door half-folded open. Built-in shelves.

“Brigitte,” Ghost calls from somewhere else. Her voice echoes in the emptiness and Brigitte hesitates just a second longer before she leaves the room and crosses back through the main apartment to the other side where Ghost stands in a doorway that’s the first in a long hallway. The room she’s found is bigger than the other bedroom. There’s a triangle of worn-smooth wood in the hallway where the bottom of the door has scraped over it again and again. Ghost flits out, exploring, and Brigitte follows her down the hallway. The first door on her left is a linen closet, then on the right, near the end, a tiny bathroom, just big enough for a tub, sink and toilet. Ghost sits down on the toilet set, and her knees almost touch edge of the tub opposite. She laughs a little. “I’m like Alice in Wonderland.”

Brigitte half smiles and digs around the edges of the mirror until she finds a groove and pulls it open to reveal a medicine cabinet. Nothing inside but a freaked out ghetto bug which disappears through a crack in the back almost before Brigitte can register it. At least it’s not a cockroach.

Behind her, Ghost is turning taps on and off. “There’s no hot water,” the landlord is saying from the bathroom doorway. “But it’s included in your lease, so we could have it turned on by the time you move in. You have to pay for your own heat and electricity.”

Brigitte wanders back out to the centre of the floor, between the living room and the kitchen and stares out the windows. An old fire escape mars the view from window on the far left, and directly across from them is another building. There’s no view to speak of, no more big, open, suburban Ontario sky. The buildings in this city are so high they make her dizzy. The floors in this apartment are creaky and crooked. In fact, the whole place is a little bit strange but there’s something about _this_ place, this apartment, that she loves.

Near her, the floor creaks, and there’s a soft presence at her side. Ghost, her bare arm warm against Brigitte’s. It’s warm in here, at the beginning of August, and Brigitte can smell Ghost’s goatsmilk shampoo, warm and buttery. There’s the faintest dampness at her temples, summer sweat colouring her pale hair a dirty gold. Ghost looks at her and Brigitte reads her answer there.

“Okay,” Brigitte says. “Can we sign the lease?”

~

It takes them almost a year to properly move in which, Brigitte supposes, is what happens when it only takes you fifteen minutes, tops, to move all your worldly possessions from the rental car up to your apartment.

For a solid six months they eat standing at the kitchen counter or sitting on the floor, their backs against the cabinets, plates balanced on their knees. They collect furniture piece by piece, pillaged from yard sales and the ends of driveways, early in the mornings before the garbage truck comes to take it away. The find work, both of them, and that’s what leads to them getting a TV from one of Ghost’s co-workers for twenty-five dollars. It sits on the floor for weeks, its cord snaking across the floorboards behind it until they finally decide to pool their money and buy a navy blue steamer trunk as a stand, and that’s where they put all their off-season clothes and whatever else they can’t find space for.

At first, Brigitte feels guilty for all these little reasons she can’t place. At sharing a space with another person who is not Ginger. Another girl. She feels guilty when she sees their toothbrushes in the cup on the bathroom counter, and when she sees their shoes all mixed together in the hallway. She feels guilty every time they sit together on the couch to read or watch something, and every time she’s relieved to hear Ghost’s key in the lock at the end of the day. She feels guilty when she can hear the water in the shower running or hear Ghost bumping around in the morning on her way to work, and finds comfort in just knowing another person is there. She has no idea what to do with all this guilt, so she just sits with it and, gradually, it becomes a little less.

The place starts to feel a little more like it’s theirs. There’s their laundry mixed and hung up on the drying rack to save money on drying machines, and the cactuses Ghost bought when they were _supposed_ to be looking for a microwave that now sit on the divide between the kitchen and the living room. They have cheap boxed dishes that chip almost immediately and Brigitte thinks that it’s possible that in the whole apartment, only the dishes and cutlery match. Even the kitchen table has three mismatched chairs.

Ghost finds work at a small diner that she likes because it keeps her head occupied. It’s early mornings most of the time, but the customers tip well. It also gets her the occassional free meal whenever she works an evening shift. Brigitte first finds work stocking shelves at a grocery store, her evenings spent under the persistant buzzing of harsh fluorescents. It sucks, but it pays the bills, and she doesn’t have to talk to people unless they need help finding something.

Once school starts, it’s harder. She always felt like she understood science classes in high school, and while she can grasp the theory and can make decent marks in her chemistry and biology classes in university, she just finds that she can’t drudge up the energy to actually do it. School all day is followed by work in the evenings. Sometimes she sleeps in the library between classes, because she stays up so late to study. And it’s not that the pace it too hard, or the material is too challenging, it’s just that as the semester drags on she finds herself sitting in classes that all feel the same, just listening to an echo of that fluorescent buzz in her ears with her pen poised over the page, only when the lecture ends, she hasn’t taken any notes.

She fails her physics final. She doesn’t think she’s ever failed anything in school in her life, at least not an exam. She holds the paper in her hands and just sits there at the back of the classroom with this strange, sharp, heavy taste in her mouth, like eating with a rusted fork. She thinks that she just wants to go home, see Ghost. When she gets there, finally, the lights are on, but the house empty. Ghost has a habit of forgetting that they pay for electricity.

“Fuck,” Brigitte says, and drops her bag. She goes around shutting lights off, flicks the space heater on and wraps a blanket around her shoulders. She stares at the blank TV, at the stuyding she still has left to do for English and Chem. She can’t bring herself to move. The evening light — what little of it there is in December, fades quickly and she’s left sitting in the dark.

She wonders _What the fuck am I doing here?_

She startles when she hears Ghost’s key in the door, and she jumps up to flick on a lamp, ashamed suddenly, of feeling so sorry for herself, just sitting around in the dark.

Ghost comes in breathless from the stairs and holds up a plastic bag. “Supper,” she says. Brigitte is profoundly not hungry. “Did you eat?” Ghost asks, already banging around in the kitchen, getting plates, forks.

“Not yet,” she answers. She looks for something to do, half-reaching for the TV remote, then changing her mind and pulling her chemisty book closer. She’s exhausted just opening it to the page she’s marked. The couch dips as Ghost settles beside her, handing her an empty plate. She opens the plastic bag and pulls out takeout containers for them to pick from.

“This one’s spaghetti bologese,” Ghost says, handing it to her. “In case you were getting sick of the gluten free pasta.” She grins at her, because she knows Brigitte is. Pasta sauce never sticks to rice noodles right, and she still can’t figure out how the fuck to cook them so they aren’t mushy and gross. She’s overwhelmed, suddenly. By the exam, by the fact that she has to work at the grocery store tomorrow, at all the studying she has left to do, and the fact that she wasted an evening just sitting here sulking instead of actually doing any work. She’s overwhelmed by Ghost’s kindness, by her own fucking helplessness, her own exhaustion.

She takes a breath and it shakes a little. “I failed my physics exam.”

Ghost pulls a face and looks at her. “Crap,” she says. “What happened?”

Brigitte shakes her head. She can’t quite look at her. What the fuck is she good at, if it’s not science? Why the hell is she even here in Toronto, spending all this money to study something she can’t even do? What if it just gets worse?

“It’s like…” she says, “I just don’t care?”

Ghost presses her lips together sympathetically. Then she shrugs her shoulders unevenly and lets them fall. “So quit.”

“Yeah, and work at the grocery store for the rest of my life.”

“No, dummy” Ghost says. “ I mean, think about it. It’s not a coincidence that all the schools you applied to also have a photography program.”

Brigitte goes still, and then turns her head a little to look at her, through her hair. “How do you know that?”

“I looked at the pamphlets you had. When I was trying to figure out where I should study. Just switch your program.”

“It’s not that easy, Ghost,” Brigitte says.

“Why not?” Ghost asks.

Brigitte just looks at her, lips slightly parted. _Why not?_ It seems crazy. She came here, she got _into_ a school to do a Bachelor of Science, and now she’s going to change it to Fine Arts. That seems crazy. But something has loosened in her chest. Brigitte takes a breath and looks back at the food in front of them on the coffee table.

_Why not?_

Suddenly, she’s starving.

~

By April, Brigitte has switched her program and quit her grocery store job. The entirety of second semester had been just her doing a mountain of catch-up work in the photography program, but, on the bright side — frequenting totally different university buildings and traversing totally different routes to classes — she stumbled upon a poster for work positions at the museum near campus.

The woman who hires her is named Alice. She is blunt, to the point, and doesn’t bother with any social niceties. She gives off an air of toughness that Brigitte senses, somehow, that she doesn’t really possess. She hires Brigitte on probation to see how she works out and while that was terrifying at first, Brigitte’s fairly certain that Alice will keep her. And it’s a good job. Much better than the grocery store. She’s done every evening by ten at the latest, and eight more often than not. She does filing and cataloguing and categorizing and, sometimes, if the girl at the front desk, whose name is Beth-Ann, calls in sick (or hungover), Brigitte covers for her. On those evenings, she does her homework at the desk after the afternoon crowds die down, and Alice doesn’t seem to mind.

She goes home to Ghost.

They paint the large wall behind the couch a deep terracotta and it doesn’t take long before it begins to be filled, like a blank canvas, with Ghost’s drawings and Brigitte’s photographs — mostly just the really good ones — mostly black and whites. There are no pictures of herself or Ghost anywhere. That would be too much like their room — her and Ginger’s. But sometimes she thinks that she would like to photograph Ghost. In black and white. She wants to highlight the paleness of her eyelashes against her eyes, which — in low light — look liquid black. She wants to photograph her laughing, before she gets her braces off, because Brigitte likes them. She likes that they do something to Ghost’s face the same way that piercings do. She likes watching people, and the way their eyes flicker to Ghost’s mouth. It’s weird. Maybe that’s weird. But she likes knowing something about someone before other people do. It feels like proof that they’re close.

It’s the same feeling she gets when she can tell Ghost is lying but others can’t. Intimacy. Ghost blinks fast, her eyes dart away, her hands move differently than usual. On paper, she has a diagnosis for Schizotypal Personality Disorder and mild BPD. She lies compulsively to deal with guilt, which she has a lot of. She goes to therapy religiously. Sometimes, during harder times, Brigitte goes with her, waits for her outside. Like Brigitte, she’s been dealt a rough hand by life, but unlike Brigitte, her trauma is grounded in what most people consider to be reality. Trauma, neglect. Brigitte has a creature from a fairy tale.

But… she remembers Dr. Brookner telling her that she had the marks of someone who had suffered abuse. She told her like it was something you could see on Brigitte’s skin. “Do you know,” Dr. Brookner had asked her, “Who treated you this way?”

And there were a thousand excuses. A hundred guarded responses. She could simply have said no. She could have said ‘does it matter, Eleanor?’ but she didn’t. Instead she stared at the ugly blue carpet between them and thought about all the times she felt like Ginger was just out of her reach, even when she was alive and vibrant, before Brigitte had any real idea what death meant. And all the times she’d made Brigitte feel like a burden, like she was worthless, like she would never make it in this world without her.

“Yeah,” she said, and met Dr. Brooker’s eyes. “I remember.”

“And where is that person, now?”

“Gone.”

**GHOST**

She goes to work on her eighteenth birthday because people don’t usually remember. Sometimes even Ghost forgets, and she has to count back on her fingers to ’87 to remember how old she is. Looking in the mirror that morning to tie her hair up into pigtails to keep it off of the back of her neck in the summer heat, she thinks that she still looks pretty much the same as she always does.

She runs from the bus to their building because it’s raining and checks the mailbox as soon as she gets in, but there’s just junk mail. Nothing real yet. She’s waiting for a response from the art schools she applied to that winter, but she knows it’s still too early. Their front door sticks in the Spring humidity and she has to push it twice with her shoulder to get it to open, her wet sneakers sliding a little against the floorboards.

The lights are on somewhere, so she follows them to the kitchen. Brigitte turns back to her from the coffee maker and says “You got rained on.”

“I forgot my umbrella.”

“You should have called, I could have met you,” she tells her, circling the divide to dig through her bag as Ghost shrugs out of her cardigan. Her hair falls half-dry against her bare shoulders and makes her shiver in her tank top, even though the apartment is as humid and warm as outside. She hangs her sweater on the back of the chair to dry, then turns to the cupboards to see if there’s anything she can eat. There’s a soft slide of something against the countertop, and Ghost looks. It’s a box, wrapped in tissue paper from the museum gift shop, for when people buy breakables.

“Happy birthday,” Brigitte says, soft and Ghost just… loses time for a second. It’s like she’s thrust back through every birthday, mostly with Barbara. She can’t remember anyone ever buying her a gift. She knows her parents must have, when she was a baby, but Barbara only did Christmas, and it was always practical. Socks, mittens. It was perfunctory, to have Christmas with Barbara.

“Oh,” Ghost says, because she knows she has to say something. She looks up, and Brigitte looks uncertain.

“I just…” she begins, and Ghost catches back up with the moment.

“Thank you,” she blurts. “Sorry, I just… Barbara never really did birthdays.”

**BRIGITTE**

That, she thinks, is different. Pamela did birthdays, and Brigitte always squirmed with extreme embarrassment every time it was hers. She hated opening gifts in front of people because you either had to pretend or not over-react, and no matter which it was, she always felt overwhelmed. Like her reaction wasn’t the right one. Like everyone’s eyes were on her for something they all understood better than she did.

Brigitte is actually good at gifts, but she hates the giving and receiving. The moment where everyone has to react right, and just enough. She remembers getting her camera, the 35mm from Henry and even though she was beside herself with excitement — her hands shook — she always felt like she didn’t understand why. Why her, why something so nice, so expensive, when Henry sometimes didn’t even recognize her voice over the phone. It was Ginger who turned Brigitte’s gifts around for her, into something that was just hers and not still tied to someone else. The moment they took their own photos with that camera, it became Brigitte’s. It became what she could make with it, not what it was — a gift from her father who was otherwise so emotionally checked out.

“It’s just… eighteen’s big, so…”

She turns away, takes refuge at the coffee machine with her shoulders tensed . She hears Ghost unwrap it without the fervor and speed she does most things with. It’s just artist pens for colouring, but they’re nice ones, and she knows Ghost wanted them. They’re a week of no lunches, for Brigitte, but they’re also…

**GHOST**

“Oh… Brigitte,” Ghost starts. This isn’t right. Brigitte needs a new DSLR camera, her own, not just the rental from school. She knows how much these cost. “But how did you—”

“It’s also... like a thank you,” Brigitte says. She turns back to her, clinging to a cup of coffee, her fingers worrying the edge. They both go still. “I mean,” Brigitte continues with difficulty. “I probably wouldn’t have gone into the photography program without you. I just… I mean, you’ll need things for school, so, I just…”

“I haven’t even gotten in, yet,” Ghost says, softly.

Brigitte half smiles, but her eyes are guarded. She looks away, hiding behind her hair. “You will.”

Ghost’s hands are shaking. Her whole body is vibrating with whatever this is, this overwhelming feeling. She’s clutching the pens because she just wants…

She crosses to Brigitte who steps back into the counter, but lets Ghost take the hot mug from her hands. Ghost sets it down on the counter, and then wraps her arms around her and holds on hard. She normally doesn’t. Brigitte doesn’t like being touched, Ghost thinks. Or maybe she’s afraid of it, because sometimes it's different. Sometimes, Brigitte almost _almost_ leans into her when they sit arm to arm on the train. She doesn’t step away from her like she does from other people when they stand too close. It's like Brigitte's just longing for that contact. Sometimes. But doesn't know how to ask. So it's always Ghost who closes the distance.

So Ghost holds onto her, now, while the rain falls against the windowpanes outside, and after a moment, Brigitte puts her arms around her and holds onto her, too.

And maybe that’s the moment that something shifts.


	6. Chapter 6

**BRIGITTE**

The very first time Brigitte gets drunk is when Ghost receives her acceptance letter to OCAD. Brigitte is twenty and, although she’s legally able to buy liquor she has no idea what to get. But Ghost insisted, and so here she is, reliving her grocery store PTSD as she stands beneath buzzing too-bright fluorescent, staring at shelves. She’s had white wine at weddings and didn’t much care for it, but there are a couple bottles of red that have tarot cards on the label, The Lovers and The Moon. She picks The Lovers, not because she understands anything about the descriptors on the label, but because The Moon has changed for her, now. It’s not just something that hangs in the sky anymore, even though full moons had nothing to do with the lycanthrope that attacked her sister, or her sister’s transformation. She still can’t separate the two in her mind.

She got her first period a year ago, at nineteen on a first quarter moon and bled again at last, not even two weeks later. For months, her body tried to figure out its own rhythm. Once she bled for three weeks straight, like she was making up for all that time that was lost — shedding her skin like a snake, only it’s inside of her. It’s something most people can’t see, or couldn’t understand. She evens out after that.

She doesn’t hate it as much as she thought she would. As a teenager she looked at her period, the Curse, as something terrible, as something that happened _to_ her instead of within her. But when it’s hers, when it’s her own body aching and bleeding and finding a rhythm, like the tide, she doesn’t hate it anymore. She understands it a little better, maybe, now, without the saccharine influence of Pamela’s dinner table period talks and Nurse Ferry’s explanation that made her feel, at the time, like she would be purging bile once a month.

It’s not like that at all. Sometimes in the shower she slides her hands briefly between her legs and watches the blood rinse itself clean from her fingers and thinks that it’s amazing that she still functions, that she still does her day to day, bleeding like this, in secret. In some ways, it’s the wound she always felt she deserved from that Halloween, in 1999. It’s the wound she deserves for plunging the knife into Ginger’s breast, and for leaving Sam’s corpse in that bleak, empty hallway for who knows how long. For who knows who to find.

Sometimes she cries, in the shower, when she knows she’s home alone. She cries until her throat hurts, and her breath shakes from her lungs, and she wonders if she’ll ever be rid of all of this pain and all of this guilt, and what kind of person that will make her if she does, somehow, get free.

“I’m sorry,” she sobs, sometimes, to no one. No one that can hear her, anymore. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

~

Ghost’s real name is Miranda, and that’s what the acceptance letter says. Dear Miss Miranda Goderitch, we are pleased to inform you…

Brigitte can’t fathom anybody calling Ghost _Miranda_ , although when she looks at her, she guess that, maybe, she can see it. Names are strange and intimate. People always look like their names or, at least, they look how people say their names. Names are personal to the people who call you by them. To Pamela she was Brigitte — Bridjit. Hardening the ’t’ sound until it came out like D. Not wrong, but not exactly right, either. Sam shortened the sounds somehow. Brigitte — abrupt. Like her name was in two pieces. But that was just Sam — cutting his consonants into these tight, clear bursts; like they were just needless obstructions in the way of the next vowel. She liked the way he said it. To Ginger, she’s Bee. Or she was. And that name felt more like… like that _made_ her Ginger’s. Like she was Ginger’s and not her own, but that made her feel… loved. Special. No one else ever called her that. Even if they wanted to, Brigitte wouldn’t let them. And when Ginge did call her Brigitte, she said it the right way. The way Brigitte says it, with the g and t’s softened. Sometimes she wonders if she says it that way because Ginger did. Because Ginger called her that before Brigitte could even shape the sounds herself.

She feels a little like _she’s_ all these different angles. Different around each of these people. She’s the same person, the same name, but she changes depending on how the light shifts, somehow. Somehow she knows she’ll remember the sound of Ginger calling her Bee long after everything else has faded, and Brigitte misses her with a visceral ache.

**GHOST**

Brigitte is quiet by the time she comes home with the wine. She sometimes gets like this, when she’s on her own long enough. Of course, ‘long enough’ for Brigitte can mean half a minute into the kitchen and back. It can be the length of time it takes the kettle to boil for tea. Ghost has gotten used to it, by now. There’s a lot of really difficult things about Brigitte, she thinks, but difficult doesn’t mean bad. Brigitte’s not good with people, but then, neither is Ghost, and that just means that they kind of swallow one another's idiosyncrasies easily. They work around them and that works out.

Still, she often wonders where she goes, in her head. Like what she’s thinking about that’s so close to the surface, just waiting to pull her under. She knows that it probably has something to do with her sister, who died. Brigitte has shown her a picture of Ginger, once. Red hair, peaches and cream skin. The same green eyes as Brigitte.

Ghost was surprised, though, because they really don’t look alike. She pictured someone as small and dark as Brigitte is, but Ginger was not. Still, there’s something in their faces that marks them, unmistakably, as sisters. Ghost just can’t pinpoint what it is. She thinks she could get a handle on it, if she drew them, but Brigitte didn’t like it when she drew the lycanthrope, so Ghost decides that she’s going to stay away from drawing Ginger, for now.

She does draw Brigitte though, sometimes. Sometimes it’s just a little joke, like the time Brigitte snapped at her over supper halfway through Saskatchewan because she was talking too much. A little sketch on a fast food napkin in the awkward silence that followed, of cartoon Brigitte with her hair in her face, snarling out at the viewer as she bites into her pasta.

Ghost had slid it across the table to her and Brigitte had stared down at it for a moment before twisting her mouth out of an almost-smile. She’d glanced up, and it was all there in her eyes, that smile. Ghost saw it for a glimmer of a second, like a magic trick, or a spectre.

“Sorry,” Brigitte had said. She’d kept the drawing. It lives pinned to the kitchen wall beside the microwave.

Ghost has also drawn Brigitte for real. Reading in profile in the chair by the window, her hair cutting ribbons out of the light streaming in. Ghost likes the line of Brigitte’s nose, and how it contrasts so sharply with the softer curve of her jaw, and her lips. Brigitte’s face looks sharp and soft by turns, and no matter how Ghost draws her, something about her in those pictures always ends up a little too hard. But that’s just how she looks. She’s gentler than her face looks. She’s gentler than she lets herself believe, but Ghost understands protective walls. She has them, too, only most of hers are in her own mind.

There’s a lot of things inside her own head that she can’t look at.

~

They don’t have a bottle opener, which is something Brigitte did not consider when she was at the store. They spend about fifteen minutes in the kitchen debating on how to get the cork out and eventually have to push it down inside the neck, instead of extracting it. That takes some time. By the time they finally get it open — or, well, Brigitte does, sitting on the floor with the wine bottle. It slips across the cracked tiles as the cork finally slides down into the wine and she spills some of it. They both scramble to right it, and then Brigitte actually laughs, her fingers and the hem of her grey dress dripping with red-purple and Ghost feels this swell of endearment inside her chest that is so intense and bright it’s almost painful.

“Help,” Brigitte says, and Ghost, gets her a dish rag and they mop up the floor, and then pour the wine into coffee mugs because they don’t have any proper glasses.

That sets the tone for the rest of the evening. They’re definitely not quite sober by the time they’re working on the cork of the second bottle. Ghost tries to use the handle of a steak knife and Brigitte says “no, no!” and takes it from her like she’s six years old and drops it into the sink. They use the handle of a cooking spoon instead and somehow manage to spill less of the second bottle than the first.

**BRIGITTE**

The dregs of that bottle finds them lying on the living room rug, watching the ceiling spin slowly. Ghost says “Do you believe in astrology?”

Brigitte closes her eyes, but that only makes the spinning feel faster. She digs her fingers into the rug and takes a breath. “Like horoscopes?”

“Mm…” Brigitte can imagine the face Ghost is making as she thinks. “More like… the fact that we’re not just affected by earth’s gravity. That there’s all these really enormous planets out there just circling in the vastness of the universe. Like just… everything’s whirling around each other. I think about gravity, sometimes,” she says, and takes a breath that sounds almost like a hiss. Brigitte turns her head to look at her. Ghost’s brow is furrowed, her eyes searching the ceiling like she can see the planets up there. “And how we’re just… moving so fast, all the time but we don’t even notice. The only reason we don’t collide with anything else is because of gravity, almost like it makes tracks in the universe that we can’t see. We just follow them impulsively and… those planets have to have an effect on us, don’t they? I mean, maybe not horoscopes, but something bigger than that. Like the moon and the tide. There’s this invisible tie, the…

“Gravitational pull,” Brigitte says.

“Right. I mean, how could planets so huge not affect our bodies with all that mass… pulling our gravity?”

Brigitte’s somewhere else. The ceiling spins, and the floor beneath her feels like it’s disappeared. She inhales the smell of greenery and loam and pot smoke, and Sam is saying “Some people believe that the position of the planets is imprinted into your — spirit, or your soul at the moment of your birth…”

And then Brigitte is tucked tightly against Ginger’s arm in Ginger’s bed, whispering in the darkness about the things they want to do and none of them involve dying.

Brigitte opens her eyes to her and Ghost's apartment ceiling and feels hot tears slide into her hair at her temples.

She stands up fast, stumbling a little as the room reels around her. She catches herself on the coffee table, and then she’s gone. Ghost sits up just as she hears the bathroom door slam.

“Brigitte?”

~

She has this fear that like… maybe she’s doomed to always be left behind.

And Ghost saying all that, like it’s inescapable, like she’s on a trajectory she can’t steer out of — this pull of planets and gravity. This imprint of the heavens engraved on her bones and in her blood... it frightens her.

Sometimes she feels cursed in the oldest sense of the word. Something she cannot control, something she didn’t do, but something she’s carrying forward, life after life. Destined, always, to lose the ones she loves.

She’s clutching the counter. The room sways and when she looks up at her reflection she looks pale and dark-eyed and deeply, irrevocably… alone.

She misses Ginger. She misses her so much it feels like she’s being cut open.

She breaks into sobs.

She thinks that the wolf should have taken her instead. She thinks that Ginger had so much more to offer the world than Brigitte’s meagre light.

The doorknob jiggles, but she must have locked it. She doesn’t remember.

“Brigitte?” Ghost says, right on the other side. Brigitte is practically choking on her own tears. She slides down against the bathroom cabinet, her knees pulled to her chest. Just... god, for the last five years, she feels like cloud cover — heavy, dark, impenetrable. She can’t see anything beyond how she’s coping in the moment… and Ginge was every dying star.

**GHOST**

“Brigitte, please.” Ghost is starting to feel panicky. She’s never ever seen Brigitte cry, let alone heard her just fall apart like this. “I’ll pick the lock if I have to,” she says, trying to sound authoritative. She means it though. She’s done it before. She reaches up to pull one of the bobby pins from her hair, but then the door swings open. Brigitte turns away. Ghost pockets the pin and follows her into the bathroom and shuts the door without knowing why. They’re alone here, but it just feels protective.

Brigitte can barely breathe she’s crying so hard. She’s crying like children do, uncontrollable, ripped out of her lungs. Ghost reaches out, but has no idea what to do.

**BRIGITTE**

The way her breath contracts her stomach muscles, the way her diaphragm squeezes on every exhale makes her feel sick. The room hasn’t stopped spinning and she’s nauseous and disoriented, and the dizziness is so much worse than it was in the living room. She can’t get a grip at all. She thinks she might be hyperventilating. She has to be sick, _wants_ to be sick, but when she kneels in front of the toilet, pushing the lid up hard, nothing comes up, even though she retches over the bowl. That just makes the crying worse. Ghost’s careful touch comes against her back, rubbing between her shoulder blades. She’s asking “Do you want some water? Brigitte? Just breathe for a second, okay? Just breathe, breathe…”

But Brigitte can’t breathe. She tries, but it doesn’t work. She does, however, finally throw up. She doesn’t quite manage to pull her hair back in time. Ghost is there, fingers sliding against her neck, pulling her hair away from the bowl, from her mouth. Brigitte hears her make a sharp little sound like maybe her fingers got too close to the spray.

Brigitte coughs wetly, gags, but she’s breathing again. Her body’s re-regulated itself, probably so she didn’t choke to death. She wipes her mouth and pulls away. She can feel the puke in her hair, wet and sticking against the skin of her throat. It’s tinted pink with the wine.

“Oh,” Ghost says, peering into the toilet bowl. She meets Brigitte’s eyes. “Festive.”

**GHOST**

“Festive,” Ghost says.

Brigitte fixes her gaze on her. Ghost can see her trying to focus. First she’s incredulous, and then breaks into tearful laughter. She drops the toilet lid closed, flushes. “Sorry. Fuck, I got some on you.”

“It’s okay, it’s just wine,” Ghost says. She stands up, washing her hands quickly, then kneels down in front of Brigitte again, half between her legs, and wipes the sick from her hair with a piece of toilet paper. “What happened?” she asks softly.

“I don’t know,” Brigitte says, softly. She closes her eyes, wipes tears and snot from her face. Her breath shakes out of her lungs. “You just… that made me think about someone— people I lost.”

“Your sister?”

“Her, too,” Brigitte says. Because there’s always Ginger — Ginger’s loss. And Ghost wonders who else she’s lost, but not doesn’t seem like the time to ask. Instead she just looks at her. “Do you feel better?”

“Sort of.”

“I’m going to run the bath, okay? You’ve… got puke all over you.”

Brigitte looks down at herself, wipes at her hair again, at her mouth. “Great,” she says, voice low and dry.

**BRIGITTE**

Ghost runs the water, but she doesn’t leave her. She sits on the edge of the tub and the heat from the water starts to fill the tiny room, making Brigitte feel like it’s hard to breathe. She reaches out to push the door open a little, some of the cooler air from the hallway rushing in. When she feels like she can stand up, she does, rinsing her hair where the sick is drying in it underneath the sink tap.

Ghost shuts the water off, and the silence after the roar of it is deafening. Brigitte looks up at her in the mirror, watches her as she starts to unbraid her hair. Ghost puts the pins and the elastics onto the counter beside Brigitte’s hand, combs her fingers through the pale waves. “I'm going to stay,” Ghost says, “So you don’t drown.”

“I won’t drown.”

“You’re drunk, though.”

“So are you,” Brigitte tells her.

Ghost smiles at her. “Come on,” she says.

And Brigitte watches her pull off her tank top and unzip her skirt and slide it down her legs. Brigitte hasn’t moved at all. She’s frozen. Shameless, Ghost unhooks her bra and lets it drop softly onto the pile of clothes she’s collecting at her feet. Brigitte feels herself twitch. She looks away. Cool fingers wrap around her wrist. “Come on,” Ghost says, “It’s just me.”

And something in Brigitte snags because that’s it. She and Ginger used to have baths together, until they didn’t. She can never pinpoint exactly when they stopped, just remembers the feeling of heartbreak when Ginger appeared one evening with her hair clean and damp and Brigitte, in a rare moment of bravery, fueled by the clenched ache of betrayal in her chest, asked “Why didn’t you tell me you were?” and Ginger just shrugged and looked away.

After that, it always felt like it was something they shouldn’t have done, all those times sitting across from one another in the bath downstairs, all flickering candlelight and steam rising from Ginger’s bare shoulders. Brigitte always thought that other people were wrong about the things she and Ginger did, until Ginger sided with them. That was at least a year before the wolf at the park, and Brigitte doesn’t know why, but she still feels the heat of embarrassment when she thinks about it now. What did Ginger know that she didn’t? What did Ginger feel, in that safe, warm cocoon of candlelight and bathwater that Brigitte couldn’t grasp?

It is just Ghost, she’s right. It’s just Ghost, and tonight Brigitte longs for something simpler than the life she’s been living. She misses comfort. She misses how things used to be. She knows that she’ll never find that with this girl, not like it was with her sister, and that, somehow, makes it safer than not. It makes it different, but not quite. It makes it safe.

Just once, Brigitte wants to do something for herself because she wants to do it. So, carefully, she peels her dress over her head, dropping it next to Ghost’s clothes on the bathroom floor, and then sets about the layers beneath it.

**GHOST**

“I was happy, I think,” Brigitte says. The only sounds in the bathroom are the tap dripping somewhere near Ghost’s right shoulder, and Brigitte, speaking into her knees which are drawn up to her chest. They sit in the warm water, facing one another. Ghost thinks that Brigitte looks small with her hair wet. She picks at a shaving scab on her shin and keeps her eyes down. The only light comes in from the lamps still on in the living room and the hall. It illuminates the bathroom well enough, without the harsh glare of the ceiling light.

“What do you mean?” Ghost asks her. This really feels like being friends, or even sisters, Ghost thinks. She feels much less drunk now than she did, but they’ve been in the bath for a while. They’ve already had to run more hot water once.

Brigitte shrugs a shoulder, and the water laps around them. “I mean, tonight was good. Sorry if I ruined it.”

Ghost smiles. “You didn’t ruin it.”

Brigitte doesn’t look up.

“Hey,” Ghost ventures. “You know you can talk to me about things like this. Right? I know you’re used to doing things by yourself, but I could be there if you wanted me to. I’d like to be. That’s what friends do, right?”

**BRIGITTE**

_Oh, god._ Something pulls tight in her chest. She squeezes her eyes shut. “I never really had any friends,” she says. It feels kind of like a lie, because even as she says it she thinks about Sam. In the greenhouse, the pantry. Everything he was doing, he was doing for her. So. Maybe she doesn’t deserve any friends. But, god, she wants one. Wants Ghost. And she knows that Ghost is more than willing, and she knows that they’ve been calling themselves that. She told Beth-Ann just the other day that she split rent with ‘a friend.’ But it almost doesn't really feel real, still.

She looks up at Ghost and takes a breath, tilts her head a little as she thinks about how to do this. “When we were younger, my sister and I always talked about how drugs and drinking were things _normal_ kids did in high school. We thought we were better than them for not doing any of that. But… this was... nice, like... I mean, aside from the... the breakdown and the vomiting.”

Ghost smiles at her. Her smiles are perfect and unguarded. They never look out of place on her face, just like Ginger’s. Brigitte always feels a little like a puppet when she smiles, even if it’s genuine. “Cool,” Ghost says, but then something shutters behind her eyes, and she looks down at the water, her fingers skim ever so lightly over the surface. And Brigitte gets it. It must seem like she's avoiding the issue. “I’m telling you, because I want you to know that I trust you. I wouldn’t have done any of this with just anyone. And, thanks… just… I know I’m not… easy.”

“You don’t have to be easy,” Ghost says very softly, her eyes dark and honest. The rest is unspoken. _Not with me._

Brigitte takes another breath, steady, somehow, but shallow. “I’m glad we’re friends,” she whispers, and it feels so much bigger than she thought it would, saying it. “I don’t think I could have done this — Toronto, school — without you here.”

“Yes you could have.”

Brigitte sincerely doesn’t know. She used to feel the same way about Ginger. She always thought that she’d die without her, and then she didn’t. But, fuck, she can’t go down that road again. Not tonight.

“Do you want to get out?” Ghost asks, and Brigitte nods.

~

They fall asleep on opposite ends of the couch with the TV on low. Brigitte wakes up, warm, in a flood of sunlight. She’d thought she’d be hungover, but she isn’t. Ghost sleeps hard, and it doesn’t wake her when Brigitte gets up and goes to the kitchen to make them coffee. She tries not to acknowledge the low simmer of guilt in her blood.

Ginger is gone. It can’t be betrayal anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ghost's name, Miranda, floats around the internet but I don't recall an official source. Regardless, that's how I've always thought of her. 'Goderitch' comes from Orphan Black, which is another show that John Fawcett and Karen Walton (creators of Ginger Snaps) worked on together and if you haven't seen it yet, boy, should you.


	7. Chapter 7

**GHOST**

The second summer in Toronto is, somehow, even more humid than the first, and yet, relentlessly stubborn, the white clouds that hang over the city refuse to rain. The apartment feels almost suffocating, and they don’t have an air conditioner, or even anywhere to put one. The windows twist open with a handle, like shutters, and they leave them open every night in the hopes of getting a single breeze. During the day, they keep the curtains drawn, and so it’s strange, living in a sort of pervasive shadowy darkness, cracks of light coming through the gaps in the curtains, dazzling white.

For Ghost, the summer seems long and endless. She tries to pick up more shifts at work, but they can’t take her on full time (or they won’t, because they don’t want to give her benefits), and so while she’s at the diner between six in the morning and one-thirty in the afternoon four days a week, the rest of the time she spends lingering as long as she can in art-supply stores or cafes or anywhere else with central air. Sometimes she just goes to the museum to see Brigitte, but more often than not Beth-Ann’s at the front desk and Brigitte’s elsewhere.

Ghost draws a lot, usually out in public because the darkened apartment during the day feels oppressive without Brigitte there, and Brigitte’s out a lot. She wants to graduate early, so she takes summer courses as well, anything she can get her hands on. Ghost doesn’t know what the rush is, she’s already graduated early from high school, and she’s younger than most of the people in her year. When she asked, though, Brigitte just shrugged a little and said she liked keeping busy.

But the apartment feels sort of wrong when she’s gone. It’s very quiet during the day. Ghost knows Brigitte likes that, but Ghost doesn’t. When she’s alone, she sees things just outside of where the light dazzles her eyes at the corner of her vision. Things lurk just around corners or hover in her periphery. She knows they aren’t there, but it sets her on edge. Cafes are better. Loud in that way that sounds quiet when you’re working.

Usually they have supper together. They haven’t done anything half so intimate as the night they got drunk and shared the bath, but Ghost can still feel that the air has shifted. She’s stopped talking about Brigitte in therapy. Not since they’d told her that she should start thinking about making new friends. There will be plenty of time to make new friends when she starts school in the fall, she thinks. She doesn’t need to fill her time up with people she doesn’t care about just because things are so central to Brigitte right now. It doesn’t feel bad, Ghost thinks. And besides, Brigitte needs someone. Needs her.

**BRIGITTE**

The problem with summer courses, or the last one she’s taking before fall semester, is that the professor loves group work. She’s already had to table up with other people in the class twice since the course started two weeks ago. It’s almost enough to make her walk out when the professor says that they have to form groups to do portraiture outside of class hours. He wants them to photograph each other, and then talk about the experience of being both — the photographer and the one being photographed. So Brigitte just about dies in her seat as chairs start scraping around her, and people are twisting around in their seats looking for group-mates.

She imagines that maybe she’ll just be overlooked, and she can somehow do the project without anyone noticing that she doesn’t have class partners, but of course it doesn’t work that way, and she eventually ends up with three others students and the discussion about when and where they’re going to meet commences. Sometimes she thinks that university is just as bad as high school. It’s still all guys trying to be funny and girls subtly flirting. Brigitte does her best to disappear into her seat, but she writes down her contact information alongside everyone else’s and they plan to meet up that evening to get everything done as quickly as possible. The report she can write on her own, thank god.

**GHOST**

“Hey, do you want to order takeout for supper tonight?”

“I can’t,” Brigitte says, already disappearing into her bedroom.

Ghost follows her in, lingering in the door frame, fingers tapping an anxious little rhythm against it. “Why not?”

“Group project.”

“Oh… when will you be back?”

Brigitte’s green eyes flicker up to hers as she sits on her bed to re-tie her boot-lace “I don’t know,” She says, and there’s something guarded in her voice that isn’t normally there, or hasn’t been there lately. Not, Ghost thinks, with her. “We’re taking portraits, I’ll probably be back before it’s dark.”

“With who?”

“With— people from class. Brian someone, Elizabeth. I forget, Ghost. Go ahead and order whatever you want…” Brigitte stands up, grabbing her camera bag and checking she has everything. Ghost can practically feel her tension mounting. Finally, she meets her eyes again. Her expression clearly says _What_ , as in _what do you want?_ What she says, though is “I can leave some money.”

“No,” Ghost answers, too soft. “That’s okay.”

Brigitte looks at her for a moment too long, and then sort of shakes herself out of it, slips out past her. “I’ll see you later.”

Ghost follows her to the entryway. “Wait! I can… do you want, like… we could get Chinese, maybe or—”

“I really don’t care,” Brigitte says, and then takes a breath, softens. “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to be late… What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I just… I thought… I dunno, we always eat supper together.”

“It’s just once, Ghost,” Brigitte says. “And if I’m late, we’ll have lost too much light.”

Ghost leans back against the wall and stares down at her socked feet. “Okay,” she says. She wishes she sounded more confident. She wants to.

“What is it?” Brigitte asks, and her voice is quiet.

“It’s nothing. Sorry.” Ghost smiles. It almost feels genuine. “See you later.”

Brigitte doesn’t believe her. She searches her eyes until Ghost looks away. “I’m getting Chinese.”

“Okay,” Brigitte says.

Ghost goes into the kitchen and just… sort of stops. She doesn’t move until she hears the front door click shut, softly. It takes longer than it should.

**BRIGITTE**

She worries about Ghost the whole train ride, but then again, she has to learn to be okay on her own. She has to learn to be okay with routines changing. It’s going to be worse when she’s in school, otherwise. Brigitte knows Ghost doesn’t like being alone in the apartment during the day, but she also knows that the evenings are better for Ghost. That the neighbours make noises, and the light’s all inside instead of out. Somehow Ghost finds that comforting. She’ll be fine, she tells herself.

She’ll be fine.

But there's this inkling, too, that she's not just worried about Ghost's feelings, she's worried that Ghost will be angry with her, the way that Ginger was, whenever Brigitte's focus drifted to anyone else for a _second_. There's that, too.

~

She gets home that evening a little after nine. Ghost’s door is closed, but there’s Chinese food in the fridge. There’s even egg rolls, which Ghost can’t eat because of the batter, but she knows Brigitte likes them. Brigitte frowns at them for a moment, then pushes the fridge door closed, and turns to go seek out Ghost.

She knocks softly on her bedroom door, in case she’s asleep, but she hears a soft sound when she does, so she steps back and waits, and after a moment Ghost pushes the door open, the familiar scraping of the bottom of it against the hallway floor. “Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” Brigitte says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Ghost says. “I just… just have to work early, so I thought I’d try to sleep.”

Ghost’s eyes drift away, and Brigitte feels like maybe she’s lying. Maybe. Ghost always works early. She doesn’t go to bed before nine. Something strange and anxious twists in her stomach. “Are you mad?” she asks. It comes out less steady than she means it to. Fuck, _fuck._

“No,” Ghost says, but a heavy silence falls between them. “Just… promise you won’t forget about me if you make new friends.”

It's not, Brigitte thinks, 'don't make new friends.' It's different.

“Ghost,” Brigitte says, “I _live_ with you.” And it means more that just _you're always around_. Ghost wanted this, this arrangement, but Brigitte chose it, too.

Ghost smiles up at her, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. Her eyes are sad. “Yeah… but that doesn’t really mean anything.”

And of course, she’s right. Brigitte lived with Winnie and Koral for years, too. And for Ghost, there was Barbara, who ignored her. Brigitte doesn’t know what that feels like, but she knows how it feels to be shut out by someone you care about. By someone who's supposed to love you back.

“I won't forget about you,” she says, surprising herself with her honesty. “And also, they’re not my friends. Like… I definitely wouldn’t move to a new city with any of them.” She means the words, but she can hear herself reciting it — this script she has: all the reasons she did nothing wrong by going out, by being with other people for a little while.

Brigitte knows that she shouldn't feel like she's done anything wrong at all, but she feels it anyway.

Just like it was with Ginger.

Ghost’s smile, though, turns a little more genuine. “I ordered some food for you,” she says.

“I know,” Brigitte tells her. She watches her warily from the half-dark hallway and thinks that it's different. That Ghost is nothing like Ginger, and that Brigitte is stronger now, and that this won't be the same, it can't be. She blinks, shakes herself out of it, and says: “Come watch something with me.”

They put on something meaningless — whatever movie is on cable. Brigitte eats her egg rolls, the rest of the plain rice. When she leans back into the couch, feeling sleep starting to creep in, Ghost rests her head on Brigitte’s shoulder, her hair falling across Brigitte’s chest. It picks up the colours from the TV — blues and greens and reds. Brigitte doesn’t think when she turns her face into the crown of Ghost’s head and just stays there, watching the TV light go dark, then bright, then dark again behind her eyelids. She smells familiar. It’s so warm that Brigitte feels sweat slide down over her ribs without even doing anything, but she doesn’t move away from Ghost, even though she’s almost feverish with heat. Ghost falls asleep, curled into Brigitte’s side, but Brigitte is left wide awake, even when the cabel channel runs out of content for the night, and leaves her with the colour-block test pattern screen.

She stares at it for a long time before she nudges Ghost with her shoulder and says. “Hey… you should go to bed.”

Ghost moans, sitting up, disoriented, sleepy. She looks at Brigitte, watches her as she searches for the remote to turn off the TV, and plunges them both into darkness, save the orangeish light coming in from the city outside.

“Come with me,” Ghost says, and Brigitte feels her breath catch.

She shakes her head a little. “It’s too warm, Ghost,” she says, because that’s her best excuse. Later, lying awake in her own bed, all of the sheets kicked down to the end of the bed, she stares at the ceiling and _is_ too warm, even with the fan on her dresser on, and spinning. It fills her ears with white noise as she realizes, slowly, physically, how she just feels so hollowed out. So goddamn lonely. She wonders why she didn’t just say yes, but the thoughts that gather at her periphery then, collecting at the margins, are too dangerous and too sharp to explore tonight, in the darkness. She’s tired of being cut open.

**GHOST**

She makes friends at school. Maybe not real friends, not like she’s read about, and seen in movies, but friends who know her name, who ask to meet her for coffee or lunch, who save a space for her in classes. It’s nice, but strange, and Ghost is always toying with the parts of her personality that she lets float to the surface, and which parts she keeps carefully hidden. It’s not like the clinic, or the halfway house. These people are her age, and they don’t gang up on her to pick on her. She isn’t marked out as unusual or crazy from the beginning.

She doesn’t talk about Burnt Barbara. People ask too many questions when they find out you weren’t raised by your parents. She talks about Brigitte, sometimes. She’s careful about to who, because once she brought her up, her photography, the project Brigitte was working on about the fringes of places — the ones that exist in plain sight — liminal spaces. (She’s got all these pictures of thresholds and half-abandoned places with the lights on. It’s deliciously creepy. Unsettling enough that it gives Ghost goosebumps when she looks at them, but still beautiful enough to want to keep looking. Ghost loves them.) When she mentioned it, one of the guys in her class, Travis, said “A photographer, huh? You should invite her out with us after class.”

“Oh, no, she doesn’t go here,” Ghost says, “She’s at UofT.” She doesn’t know why she says it. It’s not even that long of a walk between the two campuses. It’s literally just up McCaul St. Close enough that she and Brigitte sometimes meet and go home together.

“Oh,” he says. “Well some other time. We’ll do a dinner party, maybe. There’s just something hot about lady photographers. Fuck, right?” he says, as one of the other guys starts nodding.

Something judders through Ghost. Seems like it clatters hard and hot like a bullet, right down her throat, tangles through her ribs, clanging around inside her until it settles, still too hot to touch, somewhere at the place her ribs connect. “Well, she definitely won’t be interested,” Ghost says.

It comes out sharp, biting. Her whole table goes silent, and then Marianne, her Typography class partner, laughs out loud, and Ghost feels her tension ease a little. Still, she grits her molars together and stares down at the table.

“Why, is she like a lesbian or something?” Travis asks.

“Maybe she’d just think you’re a piece of shit,” Marianne says. “Jesus, dude. Go take a cold shower. You’re not everyone’s type.”

Travis takes it in stride. Ghost can’t shake the tension that’s built in her. She’s shivering with it. She wishes she could be as cool as Marianne, but today she’s not there. Not settled enough.

“Time for class,” someone says.

“I think I’m going to skip,” Ghost says. “I feel kind of sick.” She gathers her things, pushing papers unceremoniously into her backpack.

“Miranda, hey…” Ghost doesn’t look back. She thinks Marianne will understand, but there’s a sound like a swarm of bees in her head. She needs to get out of here. Just before their voices meld into all of the others on campus, she hears:

“Way to go, Travis, jesus christ, you’ve upset her.”

“I didn’t mean to! Shit…”

**BRIGITTE**

She finds Ghost sitting at the bottom of the steps of the building of her last class of the day. Ghost scrambles up when she sees her, and Brigitte stops in front of her. Something’s up, she can tell because she immediately misses Ghost’s usual chatter. “What’s wrong?”

Ghost shrugs.

Brigitte doesn’t know what to do with that so she searches for her cigarettes and lights one with her back to the wind. “You just don’t want to tell me, or you really don’t know?”

“Just… guys being stupid,” Ghost says.

That’s surprising. Ghost isn't a person that makes a big deal about guys, and Brigitte feels the same clench of fear in her gut that she got whenever guys approached Ginger. Brigitte liked being invisible, but it was never so obvious how invisible she could be, until guys showed up to talk to her sister. Ghost, she knows, is like Ginger — bright. Visible. “Oh yeah?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Ghost says, and relays the conversation for her, tells her everything. She finishes with “I don’t know, I just didn’t want him to talk about you like that. He doesn’t even know you.”

Brigitte breathes a laugh that doesn’t even begin to touch her face. “You shouldn’t care what other people think. It’s a waste of time.”

“He hasn’t even met you, and he was talking like it was just a given that you'd get with him. Like he was owed something. By default.”

“So, guys like that are entitled assholes.”

Ghost pulls a face at the ground. She gets her thoughts together right, and then tells her, “He said ‘lesbian’ like it was an insult.”

Brigitte shrugs her shoulders, this jagged movement. “Let him think I am. One less fucking guy I have to deal with,” she says, and Ghost breathes a humourless laugh that echoes Brigitte from a moment before. Brigitte half turns to put the cigarette out against the wall so she can save the rest of it for later. “Did you really talk about my pictures?” she asks, almost too soft because it feels like fishing for compliments.

Ghost finally cracks a smile, looking up at her. “Yeah. They’re beautiful. You should frame some more, we can put them up.

That pulses through her like the beat of her own heart. She meant for them to be beautiful, but one of her professors had told her, earlier, that the photographs were too vacuous, empty. Brigitte hadn’t tried to explain herself. But _she_ thought they were beautiful, too. All these in-between places. They resonate with her, somehow. She feels like she’s in every single one of those photographs of abandoned buildings and broken neon signs and thresholds that look empty but maybe— like, maybe lead somewhere better.

“Thanks,” she says.

Ghost reaches out and takes her arm. Hooks her own through it until she can pull Brigitte forward about half a step, and then she lets her go. “Let’s go home,” Ghost says. So they do.

Brigitte frames the pictures.

~

Sometimes Brigitte dreams that she’s standing in a dark room, and she’s got this handful of heavy, velvet-soft curtain squeezed between her fingers. It’s too dark to see anything, and she has a choice. She can leave it, she can just stay hidden in the darkness, and hide everything in here from herself, too. Or she can pull the curtain back to shed light on everything. Everything she doesn’t want to see, suddenly washed in winter-white sunlight. But she can’t see anything without shedding light on herself, too. She has to do both.

Sometimes she’s afraid to draw the curtain and find herself alone. Surrounded by junk — empty gas cans, blank polaroids, a broken orchid, fur-skins of animals that shouldn’t exist but do, anyway. Sometimes she’s afraid she’ll see the detritus of her own life, and it will amount to nothing at all, and there won’t be a single goddamn person here to see her.

Sometimes that’s less terrifying, though, than finding that someone else can see her, too. Sometimes she worries that she’s all dark inside, and the light won’t matter. Or that the little candle-flame she holds inside herself, this thing she calls living, that that won’t be enough for people that are used to walking in sunlight.

She squeezes the curtain fabric, she takes shallow breaths. She never moves. Not even right before she wakes up.


	8. Chapter 8

**BRIGITTE**

It’s a Wednesday night. Autumn. They’re both in the kitchen theoretically doing something about supper, but Ghost’s art things are spread out across the kitchen table. Lately they’ve been eating in the living room anyway, when they’re together. When she’s alone, Brigitte usually just stands at the counter. Pamela would be appalled.

She’s cleared a small slice of table so that she can put the laptop there and she’s got a Document open to start the paper she meant to start yesterday and never got around to. The cursor blinks mockingly at her from the top of the blank page. She writes her name in the top corner instead, adds page numbers. Shockingly, it doesn’t make her feel that much more accomplished.

Ghost’s clinking around opposite her, where she’s painstakingly gluing staples to something she’s drawn to make it looks like spikes are emerging from their skin. It’s quiet otherwise. Brigitte writes a sentence, then erases it, then writes essentially the same thing again, dragging her fingers through her hair in frustration.

She’s halfway through absently praying for a miracle or a distraction when Ghost whispers “Shit,” urgently, and shoves her chair back. She's almost to the stove when the pan on the burner just fucking explodes into flames.

Ghost screams, startled. She reaches to take it off the heat but it’s too hot, and it clatters as she recoils. Brigitte finds, somehow, a metal pot lid and tosses it in the general direction of the pan. It half-works. Enough so that she can fix it, even though flames still lick upwards from the pan. She gets the cover on properly, smothers the fire.

Brigitte spins back to Ghost who’s holding her hand close to her chest. “Are you okay?” Brigitte asks, just as the fire alarm goes off, drowning her out.

There is a lot of smoke, and no real ventilation in the kitchen to get rid of it. Ghost swears and moves to open the windows in the living room. Brigitte circles the divide and climbs up onto the desk they have pushed against the divide on the living room side, slipping a little on unopened mail and school folders to unscrew the smoke detector from the ceiling. She pulls out the battery and silence falls, save the sound of the rain outside.

**GHOST**

She turns back from the window just as Brigitte hops down from the desk. They meet each other’s eyes.

“Sorry,” Ghost says. Because that was definitely her fault. She’d kind of forgotten she put the pan on.

Brigitte says something about it being fine, and goes back into the kitchen to shut the burner off. “Did you burn yourself?” she asks her, through the divide.

Ghost looks at her hand. It’s a little red, but not dangerously so. The kind of burn that hurts in the shower. “Think so.”

“Come run it under the tap,” Brigitte tells her and turns the sink on. Ghost followers her in. Brigitte hovers at her shoulder as she rinses her hand under the cold water. She feels her heart just starting to settle in her chest. Blinking fast she looks at the things on the stove, at Brigitte. “That was kind of scary,” she says, but she can’t help the laughter. She breathes it out as she feels the smile crack across her face.

Brigitte gives her this look that is somehow both exasperated and amused and says “You have a problem with pyrotechnics.”

Ghost sucks her lower lip because that’s probably true. The burn feels better, so she shuts the tap off. Brigitte reaches for her hand. Ghost’s fingers are icy from the cold water, but the burn is already hot. Brigitte is so careful, the feeling of her fingers just pressure, without the body heat. Brigitte still looks kind of freaked. She always takes longer than Ghost to come down from being scared, even if she thinks she hides it.

“I’m okay,” Ghost tells her. “It’s okay.”

**BRIGITTE**

That flickers through her strange and sharp. The acrid smell of smoke in the kitchen is nothing like the candle-smoke smell of the bedroom she and Ginger shared, but the words are the same. The closeness is the same. She blinks herself somewhere else. Dark purple, Ginger’s blood, her own wild heartbeat. A second later she’s back here, with Ghost, in their kitchen. They’re so close that Ghost’s shoulder brushes Brigitte’s collarbone as she turns, and Brigitte’s fingers are half tangled in hers.

_I’m not bleeding anymore, just… I’m okay. Okay? I’m okay…_

Sometimes Brigitte thinks about all the moments where she could have changed... everything; turned it all around. Sometimes she wonders what mistakes she made, what made all of it worse. Sometimes she wonders if it’s all a hell of a lot more mythological than she thought. She read once that someone bitten by a werewolf should kill the wolf that bit them, thereby lifting the curse. She wonders if they were doomed the moment Sam hit it with his van.

She wonders what her life would be like, if Ginger was still here, or if her life just… wouldn’t. Be anything. If she would be out by sixteen, like they’d promised. Sometimes she misses Ginger so desperately, so completely, that she forgets where she is, forgets how much time has passed. She wishes herself back to fifteen and soaked in gore from a dead dog on the field hockey pitch and imagines that she actually did a goddamn thing about it. That she defended herself instead of waiting for Ginger to do it all the time, that she just forgot about it. That she didn’t make the list of all the things they could do to get back at Trina, that she stopped Ginger from going out that evening to kidnap Trina’s Rottweiler. That she was stronger. That she was different. That Ginger didn’t go out that night for her.

Ghost looks up at her, and Brigitte watches her eyes change to concern without really seeing. “What’s wrong?” Ghost asks, and Brigitte thinks _everything_. And Ghost’s eyes are nothing like her sister’s, but she laughs wildly and she looks out for Brigitte, and she does stupid shit like forget the oil burning in the pan, and she stands so close, and she cares so much. And Brigitte just sometimes wishes so hard that she was someone else. Sometimes she forgets what it felt like to have someone near her, until Ghost closes that distance. Sometimes she thinks Ghost feels like a sister, and that lights her up like a warning. _Don’t go there,_ she thinks. Because Ghost has to feel like Ghost, and not like Ginger. Because it can only be Ginger, forever. But Brigitte gets so tired of pulling away from this thing that she craves like water — pulling away from intimacy in all its forms but, especially, from the feeling of someone who knows you, knows everything about you — all your dark and horrible secrets, all your ugly imperfections — and gives a shit anyway. And Ghost does.

But Brigitte can’t reconcile them in her head. She doesn’t know how to have Ghost like this without replacing her sister. And so she makes a split second decision. Or maybe it’s one that’s been percolating in her mind for months now. How to split these two women. How to set Ghost on one side and Ginger on another so Brigitte can have all of them, everything they’re offering up. She takes a short, sharp breath, and then kisses Ghost on the mouth. It’s too hard, too fast. Ghost has to step back to keep her balance.

 _Fuck,_ Brigitte thinks. Fuck, what if she’s ruined this, ruined everything? She only just manages to step away, just barely creates a space between them before Ghost grabs her face, the palm of her burnt hand hot against Brigitte’s cheek, her fingers cold, and she kisses her back. Brigitte half-turns so her back is to the sink, bracing herself and Ghost follows, and it just buries her in sensation. Ghost is sharp where Brigitte doesn’t expect her to be. She’s teeth and knees and her fingers dig in. Brigitte grips the sink and doesn’t touch her, but she opens her mouth when Ghost bites down, and then it’s kissing in earnest. And Brigitte has not stood this close to anyone in her whole life. She has never let anyone inside her like Ghost’s tongue against hers, in her mouth. Ghost’s fingers in her hair, Ghost’s thigh between her legs. She feels, for a second, like she has never been touched by anyone until Ghost cracks her open, and she has no idea how to be on her own again. She doesn’t know how she’s managed to hold her own skeleton up all these years without someone’s body against hers like right now. Brigitte hears herself make a sound, like a sob or a laugh of relief, and then she grabs hold of Ghost wherever she can reach, her waist, her shoulders, grabbing fistfulls of her clothing and pulling her close, pulling her in, but it’s impossible to get closer than they already are, oh, fuck.

**GHOST**

It’s surprising, the heat, the violence of it. She doesn’t know what to do with the rush of wanting in her, so she bites down hard on Brigitte’s lip and instead of pulling away, Brigitte just lets her in further. She vibrates with tension, with this desperation for something bigger, something more solid than kissing, even though Brigitte’s teeth knock against hers more than once, even though Ghost can feel the clench in her jaw, mouths are soft and pliant and it’s not enough.

Brigitte grabs at her, tugs and pulls at her clothes, not to get them off, just to get her closer. They’re breathing in residual smoke and Ghost can hardly find a moment to inhale. If they stop now, she feels like _she’ll_ spark and die. She tries anyway. “We—” she starts, thinking _we gotta move somewhere else_ , not the kitchen. And maybe Brigitte doesn’t hear her or doesn’t care because she digs her fingers into Ghost’s hair, tugs at the braid that hangs down her back, makes this sound like she’s drowning, desperate for air. Ghost steps back. It doesn’t kill her. Brigitte’s all bruised mouth and dark eyes, and her hair is wild around her face like a storm, strands all over the place from Ghost’s fingers. Brigitte’s hands hover like she wants to reach, but doesn’t know if she should, so Ghost reaches instead and takes her wrist and pulls her.

**BRIGITTE**

As soon as Ghost pulls away, fear sets in like alarm-bells ringing in her ears, but then she reaches. She pulls her close and at the threshold of the kitchen, they kiss again and Brigitte doesn’t know who started it that time. They kind of just meet in the middle and she’s pushing her back and back, careful, measured, in this apartment that she knows now by route, in the dark, with her eyes closed and her hands searching and Ghost’s breath fast and stuttering against her lips. They reach the couch and Ghost sort of messily falls down to sit on it, and they lose one another again. She’s looking up at Brigitte like she doesn’t know if this is right, but fuck, neither does Brigitte.

“Do you—” Ghost starts and Brigitte takes her first real breath in what feels like minutes.

“I don’t know,” Brigitte answers.

“Come back,” Ghost says, so she does. Although what she’s coming back to, she doesn’t know. She’s never been here before, never kissed anyone, never touched another person like she needed more than their physical proximity. And maybe she doesn’t, but she doesn’t know how else to keep this going. She doesn’t know how else to stand so close to someone that you’re basically just part of their beating heart, and their battered breath.

She thinks, _Oh— please,_ but has no idea what she’s asking for.

**GHOST**

Brigitte climbs over her, astride her hips and arches over her to kiss her again and it’s not close enough. “Wait,” Ghost breathes, wriggles and twists so that she’s lying back against the pillow on the armrest and Brigitte looks so freaked, so uncertain for a second that Ghost laughs and takes pity on her, and pulls her down by the back of the neck. She gets these fistfulls of Brigitte’s hair. She gets her arms around her shoulders and keeps her close until she can’t tell who’s breathing so hard against who, until their ribs touch, until Brigitte’s full weight, which isn’t much, settles over her in pieces and fragments. Until she’s got Ghost’s head in the cradle of her arms, and her fingers in Ghost’s hair and the whole thing becomes something other than proximity, and starts being about something else.

Ghost is the one to reach down and rake Brigitte’s skirt up her thighs so that it isn’t between them anymore. She feels the drag of her nails, as blunt as they are, over her skin, and Brigitte is so much smaller than she seems to Ghost, even though she’s seen her naked in the bath, even though she’s hugged her, Brigitte just feels small.

Brigitte’s fingers sneak beneath the hem of Ghost’s sweater and they are startlingly cold. She slides them over the fake-silk sleekness of the bra Ghost is wearing beneath it, and presses her fingers into the softness of her breast, gentle somehow despite her insistence.

It rains harder. The air is too cold for thunder, but there’s all this white-noise of rain and, above that, the sound of their breathing. Brigitte pulls Ghosts’s sweater over her head, pulling her half to sitting up, and then, still dark-eyed and lost to this she brushes, sweetly, at all the strands that have come loose from Ghost’s braid, strokes them back behind her ears in this touch that’s barely there. She looks at Ghost like she sees her, but like she’s not completely present in it. Ghost reaches down and takes the back of Brigitte’s thigh and digs her fingers in as she presses her hips up. Brigitte’s eyes snap to hers and Ghost thinks _I found you._

**BRIGITTE**

Somehow she thought this would be both simpler and more complex than it turns out to be. It’s easy to judge it as pointless pushing and pulling and grinding when you’re outside of it. But it turns out that it’s so much less overwhelmingly terrifying and weird than she imagined. When she let herself imagine, which wasn’t often.

It’s not like she hasn’t touched herself. It’s not like she doesn’t, sometimes, and it’s like this. That same pressure and build, that feverish centre of ache and wanting pressed against the heat of Ghost’s, through their clothes. Brigitte’s skirt spills over Ghost’s stomach, and down the back of her own legs, and Ghost’s jeans are undone and pushed down her thighs, the only thing separating them is the fabric of their underwear. Ghost comes first, and she’s loud, Brigitte thinks. She thinks _the window is open,_ but then Ghost’s fingers are between them, between their cunts and pressed up against Brigitte in this flat, hard press against her clit and she stops thinking very much at all in the moment just before she finally hits that peak, bringing herself off against Ghost’s fingers and — when Ghost pulls her hand away — against her pubic bone as she comes down.

~

“Do you think you’re gay?” Ghost asks her, some long minutes later, when their clothes are mostly re-arranged and re-fastened, except Ghost’s sweater is still on the floor and Brigitte’s tracing the collection of birth-marks on the side of Ghost's ribs with her eyes, and thinking that her skirt is twisted around her hips uncomfortably, but she’s warm, tucked between Ghost and the back of the couch, so she doesn’t move.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I've never really thought about it.” That’s not entirely the truth, but this is definitely an avenue that Brigitte has tried to steer clear of. Not because being gay bothers her, but because she thinks it doesn’t matter. Maybe, she thinks that she doesn’t deserve to have people like this. Like the way Ghost just let her have her. And Brigitte feels guilty. She started this because she felt guilty for replacing Ginger, and now she feels guilty for doing something they always condemned. And more than that, she feels guilty for not feeling that fucking guilty about doing it, in spite of all of that.

Ghost traces a nonsensical lazy trail down Brigitte’s side through her shirt with her fingertips and Brigitte’s eyes flicker up to her face, and she thinks that it’s remarkably not that awkward at all. It’s just Ghost. And she feels lighter than she has in months. Like she’s swept all the bad stuff out. She knows it will collect again, these things always do, but for now it’s astonishingly easy to just lie here, and she’s reluctant to jump back into the tension and angles of her usual, waking body, let alone actually get up from the couch and Ghost’s radiator-warmth in order to do that.

“It’s just… I never really hear you talk about guys,” Ghost says. “Or see you looking at them.”

“You see me looking at girls?” Brigitte counters.

Ghost is silent for a little while, and then says “…me.”

“…Ah.” And maybe that's true. Because so much of the time, it seems like nobody even wants to reach Brigitte, let alone tries. Ghost did. Ghost _does_.

Ghost shifts, resting her head on her arm and she smiles a little. Smiles at her.

Brigitte falters before the attention, a little overwhelmed by dark eyes and pale lashes, and she drops her own gaze from Ghost’s.

The thing is, Brigitte thinks, is that it’s not that she isn’t interested in guys. There was… _fuck,_ she tries not to think about him… but there was, of course, Sam. It’s easier now, to look back on it and see that she was— that she did— like him. It’s easier because he’s dead, and because she was a different person then. She was Bee, she was Ginger’s sister. Now she feels like neither of those things.

Whatever she felt for Sam had been a stupid thing, at first. This attraction that was purely physical, because he was kind of the most beautiful guy she’d ever seen. If someone had asked her — what was it? Like what was it that she saw in him that she might want to photograph, she wouldn’t be able to tell them, now. Sam and what he’d looked like has blurred in her mind like vaseline on a camera lens, softening his features until he’s just sort of indistinct. Above everything, she remembers his voice, and the way he touched things, and how blue his eyes were. And the way he was so much more vulnerable than she’d thought a guy could be. So much more human. He was the antithesis of what Pamela said. He was smart and honest, and, god, she’d _wanted_ him to like her, wanted him to care for some reason other than her turning into something…

And she thinks that, maybe, he did, but by then, everything had shifted. Brigitte didn’t have any more time, and there would be no more long talks in the greenhouse. By then, she was losing Ginger, and that was bigger than everything else. Sometimes she can tell herself that he followed her into her bedroom — their basement, that pit of hell — that night, because he wanted to prove something. His bravery, perhaps; or that he was needed. She tries to tell herself that it wasn’t about her, because it's easier to swallow that way. She told herself all kinds of things, but it all comes down to the fact that he spent the last few weeks of his life doing everything for her.

And she didn’t deserve it. And she shouldn’t have asked. And his death is her fault, and maybe she’d cared about him in a way Ginger wouldn’t have liked, but it’s there, now. That’s how it was, and Brigitte knows it.

And she has never told Ghost about Sam, because there are so many things she holds too close to herself, and Sam is one of those. But Brigitte can’t tell the story of her life without Ginger, so that’s what Ghost knows. Brigitte carries Sam in secret, a thorn in her chest that’s been hurting her for so long now that she barely even notices the pain anymore. Only when pressed.

She looks up at Ghost again, Ghost is is watching her thoughtfully, waiting for her with as much patience as a person like Ghost can muster. Brigitte says “There’s been guys.” And she leaves it at that.

~

**GHOST**

The rain, and the fire, brought changes, that year. It brought her Brigitte in a different way — a way that feels more like having her than before. There’s a give and take to this new thing that Ghost thinks she understands. Somehow, it feels more genuine, or maybe it’s just that she’s seen Brigitte with her walls down, now, and Brigitte knows it. It just takes a little while to give it a name.


	9. Chapter 9

**BRIGITTE**

It’s an arrangement.

And Brigitte thinks that that’s a better term than most, because it’s not confusing. They’re not in love, and in a lot of ways this makes so many things easier. Touch is suddenly allowed where it wasn’t before, by some unspoken rule, whether it was in Brigitte’s head or something else. If she has an arrangement with Ghost, whatever happens between them isn’t like sisters, isn’t intimacy the way Brigitte understood it with Ginger, it’s something else entirely.

That’s where she wants to be. And if that’s what Ghost wants, too, then who are they hurting? (She isn’t really sure why she thinks that something like this might hurt anyone, anyway). And Brigitte likes being touched; as much as she isn’t used to it. And suddenly there’s Ghost’s hand slipping into hers for the first time at the bagel shop on a cold morning. It’s surprising enough that Brigitte forgets what she’s going to order, but the warmth of Ghost’s touch lingers, even after Brigitte pulls away to find change to pay. She likes little things like that. She had no idea how much she missed them until she had them again. Just, with Ghost, there’s no playful shoves or sharp jabs to her ribs. Ginger was rough and tumble and usually didn’t meant to hurt — at least not in a mean way — and so Brigitte always just sucked it up. Because that was just Ginger.

Ghost touches her soft, but every time Brigitte lets her, the uncertainty about it that hangs between them fades even more until it’s barely detectable. Along with the uncertainty, the kissing disappears as well. Something about it feels dishonest, after that feverish first time, almost as if it exists as just a means to an end, until one morning sharing the bathroom mirror while Ghost braids her hair and Brigitte tries to brush hers into something halfway to manageable, Ghost catches her eyes in the mirror, and then turns to her and just pulls the brush from her fingers.

As their hands overlap and Brigitte takes a step back beneath Ghost’s sudden undivided attention, she thinks _But…_ because they have errands to run and today is one of the few days they can go together, and share the burden of big box stores and crowds of mass consumers with some moral support. Still, she lets Ghost take the brush and lets Ghost kiss her because no matter how much she forgets about it the rest of the time, the second this need inside her is promised fulfillment, it comes roaring to the surface of everything else. Not even for sex; just to be touched, wanted, held onto.

But she likes the soft question of Ghost’s fingers tracing a line from the centre of her ribs down to her hip. The kiss overwhelms her, distracts her, mechanics she half doesn’t care about. She turns her face away almost without meaning to, and then feels bad about it, shying into her own shoulder, one hand coming up to touch her mouth. “Sorry,” she says, and then reaches out.

**GHOST**

Ghost feels a flicker of fear when Brigitte pulls away — both that she’s done something wrong and that Brigitte maybe doesn’t want this anymore. Doesn’t want her. But then Brigitte mumbles an apology and reaches for her again and the fear in Ghost’s throat starts to settle. She steps into her when Brigitte pulls. Brigitte catches her waist and Ghost feels her fingers slide under her shirt, this whispered, erratic tap of her fingertips against Ghost’s skin.

The errands end up more or less forgotten.

“Did I hurt you, before?” Ghost asks her, both of them in Ghost’s room, soaked in the kind of afternoon sunlight that means they’ve definitely missed their window to beat the rush of other Saturday shoppers.

“What?” Brigitte was half-dozing. She looks over at her, reaching up to rub her eye with her fingertips.

“When I kissed you?”

Brigitte considers this, considers her. Ghost thinks she stops breathing when Brigitte’s eyes fall to her mouth.

“No,” Brigitte says. “But, you know, you could just ask me. Or…” She looks unsure of herself, looks away. “Or, I dunno.”

“Okay,” Ghost says, because it doesn’t bother her in the slightest. People are strange and filled with preferences and, she thinks, sometimes kissing Brigitte is like trying to kiss distraction out of her mouth. They’re still just figuring this out.

Brigitte sighs relief, and that hits home for Ghost more than the rest of it. Like maybe Brigitte was anxious about it, like she was doing things against her better judgement. Ghost reaches out and touches Brigitte’s wrist. “You could just ask me, too,” she says, almost an echo. Meaning ‘ask me not to,’ meaning ‘ask me for anything.’ And when Brigitte looks at her, then, her eyes are brightest green, something totally unguarded in her face.

“Okay.”

~

**BRIGITTE**

They both hold onto that — _you could just ask me._ It becomes an unspoken rule to this whole thing, and somehow that lets them venture further than before and what started with half-clothed touching, always that one last layer between her fingers or her thigh or the heel of her hand against Ghost’s cunt turns into something different. Turns into discovering the impossible softness inside of her, turns into the fact that this is all more intimate and intricate than she ever imagined — ever let herself imagine.

 _You could just ask me_ is the reason she doesn’t hesitate as Ghost presses her fingers that first few centimetres inside her the first time and Brigitte’s hand shoots down like a javelin to catch her wrist and stop her. _You could just ask me_ is why Ghost doesn’t try it again, and instead it’s Ghost’s sharp hip, or the more controlled pressure of Ghost’s fingertips against her clit, or the achingly impossible, impossibly slow climax of Ghost’s thigh between her legs that isn’t what she needs it to be when she finally gets off, but leaves her weak and shaking anyway.

But it’s not infallible. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t. And for the most part, she trusts Ghost. They share a bed — Ghost’s or hers — almost as many nights as they don’t. She falls asleep easier with Ghost there, but the mornings bring this longing to be alone or just… different. Different room, different city, different person asleep beside her. Different Brigitte. She doesn’t know exactly what, just that she can breathe easier through the darkness when she’s breathing in the smell of Ghost’s skin, but the mornings make her feel caged.

She carries that feeling with her to work sometimes, can’t shake it in crisp Fall air, or on the bus ride. She’s twenty-one years old and feels totally lost, just repeating the same patterns day in and day out, seeking refuge in Ghost’s skin and Ghost’s mouth, and finding purple bruises on her breasts and her thighs come daylight — the evidence of all Brigitte’s ceaseless, bottomless want — a stark reminder imprinted in her flesh. Sometimes she can’t reconcile herself with the person she was the night before, fingers clenched in Ghost’s pale hair, and the heat of Ghost’s breath between Brigitte’s shaking thighs.

She needs something to change. Needs a shift, an alteration. And then Beth-Ann mentions the greenhouse.

~

“There’s a greenhouse?”

Brigitte’s standing near the edge of Beth-Ann’s information desk, her arms full of mail to distribute to the offices upstairs. Beth-Ann twists her chair back to look at her, surprised because Brigitte never jumps in on conversations. This particular conversation is one Beth-Ann’s having with her brunch friends. Brigitte doesn’t know if they ever actually go to brunch, but it feels like they talk about it constantly.

Beth-Ann and her friends full on stop their conversation and there’s about four pairs of eyes on her all at once, and this sudden silence, and Brigitte seriously considers the possibility of spontaneous combustion. She supposes it would be purposeful combustion, though, if she’s considering it.

One of the girls tells her a cross-section of streets Brigitte’s never heard of before and Brigitte honestly doesn’t know if she’s bullshitting her or not so she doesn’t say anything.

“It’s near Ryerson campus, Brigitte, jeez,” Beth-Ann says. “How long have you lived here?”

Brigitte’s frozen somewhere between trying to figure out how long it has been — a year and a half, maybe less, and just shrugging her shoulders. She feels herself twitch bodily beneath the attention, her indecision. She sees one of the girls start to smile in that side-eyeing way, like _oh god, what a freak_ , so Brigitte looks down at her armful of mail before she rolls her eyes too obviously. She adjusts everything in her arms and then walks out.

~

On her way out that evening, Beth-Ann calls her back to the desk. She holds a square of paper out to her and Brigitte comes back to get it. She opens it up. It’s a tear-away map with the route to the greenhouse marked out in Beth-Ann’s purple highlighter. It’s not even that far, Brigitte thinks.

“Thanks,” she says, only half re-folding it. She’s going to need it.

“No worries,” Beth-Ann says dismissively, and turns back to her computer. Still, Brigitte kind of thinks she means it.

~

The greenhouse is actually several greenhouses, and a hot-house that has all these tropical plants, and a crowd at this time of year. Everyone wants to get warm. Once the sun goes down it starts to get cold pretty fast. She’s already cold, because she planned on just going straight from work to home. Instead she’s got her sleeves pulled down over her hands and her arms wrapped around herself at the entrance to this greenhouse that smells so much like…

It’s familiar. Smells familiar. For the first time in a long time, she feels like life isn’t just a series of inevitable moments that she can’t control, like maybe she just needs to stand in the right place for a little while to see that there’s actually infinite possibilities. She feels steady. Steadied. It’s the first time in forever.

The place is closing before she can bring herself to leave it.

On Sunday, she brings her camera back, early enough in the morning to get some good light. So much of the light in Canada is this dishwater grey. Too much or too little, always, unless she catches blue or golden hour. Still, when she gets there, she finds that she can’t photograph anything because Looking at the flowers, the greenery, through the viewfinder just makes her feel detached. She reaches out to touch them instead, even though she’s not supposed to. She brushes her fingertips against a waxy leaf then slides the camera back into its bag and just stays, for a little while.

She stops going on weekends when Ghost starts asking her where she goes. It feels secret, special, or maybe she’s been taught that greenhouses should feel that way. Leaving it to go home always feels a little like leaving the greenhouse in Bailey Downs. Like she wasn’t supposed to be there.

She wonders what happened to the plants in the County Regreening Program. She wonders who cleans up the grounds at Bailey Downs High School now, if not Sam. She wonders if that greenhouse even still exists, or if the person who took over lets kids do their high school community service there. She knows that Sam never did.

“I hate people,” he’d told her, and she’d thought _not me, though?_ but never drudged up enough courage to say it out loud.

He never told her ‘go.’

It’s an evening after stealing away to the greenhouses that Brigitte can’t face the prospect of going home just yet. Instead she stands, shivering, on the street. It hasn’t snowed yet this year, but it’s coming and that just makes everything feel colder. It’s dark, and everyone that passes her is rushed, bundled. She thinks that she wants to feel something other than Ghost’s soft mouth. She thinks that things should be different than what they are. She thinks she can’t even imagine, anymore, what a future for her and Ginger would have looked like, if they got out of Bailey Downs, because she can’t imagine Ginger working, studying, navigating these streets. She can’t imagine Ginger doing anything but burning herself out with this fierce, self-destructive insistence.

She wants to feel something that hurts; that means she’s fucking sorry. Sorry that it wasn’t _her_ body that first wolf sunk its teeth into, sorry that she never wanted to give up on her sister, but doesn’t know how they could have ever avoided careening to that inevitable conclusion. Sorry that she left Sam in that desiccated town, dead or not, and sorry that she doesn’t think she would have come back to the greenhouse bash, even if the cure did work. Her world was Ginger, then, and her fate was inevitable. And somehow her small life is tied to Ginger’s heart going still and Brigitte will never never understand why.

__

She’s shameless when she pulls her shirt over her head in the back room of some tattoo studio — the one with the stand-offish girl behind the counter who looked at Brigitte like she understood something, who looked like she might be gentle, in spite of every piece of ink and metal on her that was meant to make her look hard. Brigitte counts the rings in her ears, and the long red-blonde dreads that spill over her shoulder as she sanitizes Brigitte’s skin, and then floods her chest, her ribcage, with dark black ink.

__

It takes two sessions, several hundred dollars, and a first-name basis for Brigitte to have twin birdskulls etched onto her body forever. She knows that the pain, the healing, will never come close to the feeling of those impossible fangs, but she’s tired of killing herself in ten thousand different tiny ways. This is her relic, and her penance. Together forever.

__

And Brigitte vows to learn to live better than this.

__

The next time she winds up in Ghost’s arms, in Ghost’s bed, she fucking lets herself _feel_ it.

__


	10. Chapter 10

**BRIGITTE**

When Ghost is twenty and she is twenty-two, Ghost meets Marcus. And there’s this little sliver of dread that trickles all the way through Brigitte; starts in her mouth like the taste of smoke and then slides down her throat, blooming out through her ribs, unfurling in her belly. It’s a soft thing, and very small at first — almost inconsequential — just this glimmer of something… bad.

Except it’s not bad. This has happened before. Ghost has met guys, gone out with guys, and always come home to Brigitte, but this time, it feels different. Brigitte doesn’t know why, only that it does. This one, she thinks, Ghost likes. Like, really likes. And Brigitte doesn’t know where that leaves _her_. But that’s it. That’s the whole part of this arrangement, it was never a relationship. They’re friends; roommates; they’re intimate, sometimes, but they are not together. And if Ghost wants to date Marcus, she has every right to, only it isn’t that, yet. Brigitte’s afraid that that’s what’s coming.

She doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like that she thinks about it, worries about it. She doesn’t like that this makes her feel like Ginger. Not just Ginger after the bite, but Ginger before, too. Ginger who broke Franny Beckwith’s nose when they were little. Ginger who stepped between Brigitte and every guy that so much as looked at her — not that they were looking for any of the reasons Ginge thought that they were. It was possessive, Brigitte knows, and jealous, and she doesn’t want to be either of those things when it comes to Ghost. She wants to be better than that, but when Marcus comes up in conversation, all Brigitte ends up with is this hot mass of fear in her throat that she can’t always find a way to speak around.

It isn’t that she’s in love. It’s not some sudden realization that that’s where she’s at. She loves Ghost, but she loves her as a friend and as, maybe, a sister (but different, always different). No, it’s not even jealousy. It’s fear. Brigitte is afraid of being alone.

So maybe she does know where all this stems from after all.

And so far, Ghost always comes home to her. She never spends the night. Brigitte knows they haven’t slept together because of what they do — because of how this whole thing works between them. Ghost comes home to Brigitte and whispers what he did, what he wanted, in Brigitte’s ear, and against Brigitte’s throat, and Brigitte echoes it — echoes Marcus’s desire, only where he’s wanting, Brigitte is familiar, and she would absolutely be lying if she said she didn’t get something from the fact that she knows what Ghost tastes like between her legs, knows how to make her quake, and he doesn’t.

She takes that for herself at least. She takes that and tells herself that by doing so she is giving to Ghost, and not taking away.

Because Marcus isn’t bad. He is quiet, almost painfully shy — dark-haired, slope-shouldered, warm-eyed Marcus. Marcus who knows what they do, her and Ghost, and becomes a mirror to Brigitte’s jealousy for all these normal, healthy reasons that are somehow darker and corrupted in Brigitte. Because he likes Ghost, cares about her. Because he calls her Miranda, sometimes, like a secret, and because Ghost takes everything she feels for him and shakes through the swell and release of it in _Brigitte’s_ arms.

And sometimes, most times, Brigitte doesn’t know whether to apologize to him, or tell him to eat his _fucking_ heart out.

So most times she doesn’t say very much to him at all.

~

**GHOST**

“She doesn’t like me,” Marcus says and Ghost takes a breath because she’s been waiting for a while for him to tell her this, but he seems hyper aware of the boundaries there — all these invisible lines and tripwires when it comes to her and Brigitte.

“ ‘She walks in shadows… the scent of moss and mist clinging to her in tendrils, like fingers that want to pull her back into the sunless forest from whence she came…’ She’s not from this place,” Ghost says, switching back to her normal voice.

“What, like, earth?” Marcus asks, and Ghost smiles without looking at him. It’s finally spring, and the first day warm enough to sit outside without sweaters or jackets. Their are heaped beside them on the park bench, and ghost is rolling the cap of the pop they’re sharing along the bright yellow of her tights and then, when she reaches her knee, the metal arm-rest of the bench.

“She could be from Faerie,” Ghost says, halfway to dreamlike. “Brigitte’s just not like most people,” she says. “She doesn’t follow their rules.”

“Neither do you. You’re easier to read.”

“Maybe,” Ghost says. “But I smile more. And that makes people let their guard down.” She smiles at him, then, and stands up, brushing herself off and screwing the cap back onto the bottle. Marcus looks, for a moment, like he’s unsure what kind of thing he’s stepped into, whether or not it’s a trap.

“When do you let down yours?” he asks.

Ghost makes a face, twists her mouth to the side, and then shrugs her shoulders. “The plot’s still developing,” she tells him. The truth is, though, she doesn’t know. Brigitte is safe, and Marcus is new and he has no idea, yet, how deep Ghost’s waters go. They look inviting, all bright and shiny on the surface, but step into the pool and it’s cold and dark and, sometimes, people don’t resurface.

There’s this whiff of smoke and Ghost sniffs and rubs her nose quickly, blinks to reground herself. “It’s getting dark,” she says and meets his eyes. “I should get back.”

He walks her to the train station and Ghost thinks that she’ll test, next time, the strength of Marcus’s affection. Except she thinks that every time, and she never does it. Ghost carries a lot and she doesn’t unburden herself very often. Brigitte’s wire-thin, and delicate, swallowed up by her hair and her swathes of black and still, Ghost knows that she is stronger than Marcus. Brigitte’s water and iron. She shoulders Ghost’s darkness like it’s nothing, washes her clean, even if it’s just for a little while.

And if Ghost is being honest? She thinks Marcus would crumple beneath the weight of her sins. She thinks he would suffocate beneath it. Her comic books are a lie, and men are just not as strong as women.

~

Sometimes what they do has nothing to do with anyone else. Sometimes, like today, Ghost left her date early just to lie in bed with Brigitte and not touch for the longest time, the minutes only marked by the slow turn of pages in the book that Brigitte is reading while Ghost dozes.

Once in a while, Brigitte’s fingers fall to Ghost’s temple and stroke the pale-blonde back with these feather-light touches. Her eyes never leave her book. Ghost says “Do you ever wish this was enough?”

Brigitte looks at her for a long moment, thinking. She strokes her fingers over Ghost’s eyebrow so gently, and Ghost is very still. “Sometimes I think it is,” Brigitte says, her voice almost breaking in it’s softness. Ghost watches her — it’s one of those rare moments where Brigitte lets herself be looked at. Lets herself look.

“But you think there’s something better, huh?” Ghost asks.

Brigitte makes a face. “You mean easier.”

Ghost twists fretfully. “Well…. shouldn’t love be easy?”

Brigitte strokes her knuckles over Ghost’s cheek, and Ghost thinks that so many people will never know the affection that Brigitte is capable of. Not like she knows. “Why?” Brigitte asks.

“Because that makes it beautiful.”

“You mean easy to look at.”

Ghost considers this. “Maybe,” she says.

“I think you can love someone a lot, and still find it hard. I think… I think the Hollywood rules ruin us. Like maybe the beautiful part is the choosing to love someone over and over, even when it’s not always easy.”

“Was your sister like that?” Ghost asks.

“No,” Brigitte says. “With her, it was like a wildfire just consuming everything. I didn’t have a choice… I had to love Ginger.”

“And it destroyed her,” Ghost murmurs, her eyes flickering to the ceiling.

“Ginger destroyed herself,” Brigitte says, voices it for the very first time. “I had nothing to do with it. But it wasn’t her fault.”

“If we choose to love people, why can’t I just choose to love you?”

“I don’t know,” Brigitte answers.

Brigitte’s never been easy, but Ghost never expected her to be. “It could’ve been good,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“Brigitte…?”

Their eyes meet, and then Brigitte moves to kiss her for the first time in months and months. She kisses her for real, and it’s _like_ love, but they both know it isn’t, not really. What they’ve cultivated between them comes from a thousand and one choices; ones that brought them from their first meeting to here, and Ghost loves her, but she’s not in love.

She knows that she’s probably in love with Marcus, but maybe Brigitte’s right, and love is built on choice, and she and Marcus are so many hundreds of choices behind her and Brigitte, and what they’ve built is still small in comparison, and sometimes feels lacking.

She thinks as Brigitte puts her book down, spine up, and slides down to press flush over Ghost on the mattress, that the difference between love and friendship cannot be sex. Brigitte’s dark hair spills around them and Ghost thinks that she almost forgot the taste of her mouth, and she thinks that she loves this, but she isn’t in love.

Maybe there are no answers.

~

**BRIGITTE**

Like scales trying to equalize their weight, she and Ghost try to balance their life against the life Ghost is trying to create with Marcus. Brigitte backs off again and again, and again and again Ghost comes back to her and whispers his touch against Brigitte’s mouth and Brigitte does all the things that Marcus has never been allowed to do, and Ghost’s body swallows hers up like water, warm and safe, pulsing against Brigitte’s fingers and Brigitte’s tongue like the fucking tide.

Brigitte thinks that they have so much wild in them, and that summer comes hot and humid and filled with thunderstorms. The air is perpetually heavy, pregnant with change, and she doesn’t know what to do with any of it. Sometimes she paces the apartment while Ghost is gone, and Brigitte’s the one who feels like a spectre. Sometime she aches for the loneliness until she gets it, and then she aches for something else.

She wakes up with the sensation of dirt under her fingernails and the smell of loam so intense that she can taste it at the back of her mouth. It’s like she’s dug herself from her own grave, only it’s different. It’s different.

The heaviness in the air makes it easier for Brigitte to breathe, somehow. The tattoo on her chest has healed, and sometimes she holds her palm against the pale skin in the juncture between the two birdskull beaks and feels her own heartbeat pounding and pounding, as incessant and persistent as the ocean she has never seen.

She can’t shake the sensation of waiting. She is twenty-two and feels centuries old. She feels seventeen and reckless. She feels precisely her age and as lost as she’s ever been, and she finds freedom in that in these everyday, mundane moments: in line at the cafe in the morning; sitting alone at the table in the kitchen while the kettle boils for tea; the evening a storm wipes out the power and plunges her into darkness in the shower. She finishes by touch after that first breathless moment of shock, and then just lets herself exist in the darkness and the silence after she shuts the water off.

She feels like maybe she could be defined by something else; something other than a sister, other than suburbia. Other than her past, maybe. Not different, just… changed.

~

Her twenty-third birthday comes as soft as the rain that mists the whole day. She’s starting to feel like she can’t differentiate age anymore. It’s not like when she was a kid, and every birthday felt like something big. A milestone. She wonders if other people felt like that when they were kids. For her, it was just one year closer to sixteen and six feet below. Or freedom.

She wonders, sometimes, if they ever would’ve gone through with it. The out by sixteen. Ginger would’ve done something. No way would she have just put her head down and quietly finished high school. Or maybe she would have. Maybe she would have slipped into that fabric of what it meant to be normal and never looked back. Maybe she would have left Brigitte behind.

But she thinks that Ginger was better than that. Bigger, somehow. Larger than the life that contained her and tried to force her into boxes that made everyone else feel comfortable.

Brigitte knows that she doesn’t fit into those boxes, either, but the difference, maybe, is that she really doesn’t care what other people think. Maybe she’s so used to living in everyone’s peripheral, a girl made of shadows, that she never felt that pressure to be a certain way, the way that Ginger did. Or maybe Ginger wanted something that only that life could give her — beauty, attention, vibrancy. Because eventually Brigitte wasn’t enough for her anymore, or she was too much, and Ginger couldn’t cope. Brigitte can’t ask her, anymore. And she kind of doesn’t think Ginger would tell her, now, even if she could.

Maybe that’s not what Brigitte wants from life. She still doesn’t know what she wants, just that she didn’t want to end it by doing something stupid like gassing herself in their parents' garage. All she knew when she left their bedroom for the last time nearly eight years ago was that she didn’t want to be what Ginger became. Like maybe there was more to life than cul-de-sacs and jerkoffs in high school and the quietly simmering annoyance between Pamela and Henry that grew every day.

She doesn’t always like this city, but the city gives her perspective, sometimes. Or it makes the world feel bigger, where impossible possibilities aren’t always in the form of monsters lurching from the darkness. Sometimes it’s just the heartstopping way Ghost looks with the sun filtered in through her hair in the morning, and Brigitte realizes all at once that not every relationship has to follow a pattern in order to mean something. That it doesn’t have to be the unconditional love she felt for her sister, and it doesn’t have to be all for show like the Trinas and their boyfriends in a world where holding hands with someone was practically a political statement. And it doesn’t have to be the months and years of just settling and settling until you’re mired in it like her parents.

She’s relieved that her life has expanded beyond high school. Sometimes she’s even glad that she’s had a second to think about things just for herself. She still isn’t very good at being alone. Sometimes she feels like she’s only good at waiting, except now she isn’t just waiting for Ginger anymore.

Summer ends fast, that year, and sometimes, if she’s in the right place at the right time, she can hear the geese leaving for winter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. 
> 
> The sequel to this (which I wrote first, oops) is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20863922), if you're interested.
> 
> This was for NaNo (and quarantine) 2020 (so thank you for forgiving my many mistakes and spelling errors and feel free to point them out to me if you catch them, so I can fix them). I wrote about 20,000 words less than I hoped for but I'm aiming to write a little bit more little oneshots for my other stories, including the sequel to this, and the Brigitte/Sam story I wrote, [Constellations](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18683134), in order to make up that last 20k.
> 
> I know this movie is 20 years old, but I find comfort in writing for these characters, especially right now when things are so strange and uncertain. Let's keep hoping for the best. My honest advice (not that you have to follow it) is to start growing your own food — even herbs. You can grow potatoes and sweet potatoes in a bucket in your apartment. Not because the world is ending, but because we have an opportunity, right now, to start becoming more mindful and self-efficient. Look into permaculture, keep on baking bread, sew your own clothes, read, create anything you want, scream, dance wildly, give yourself hours or days to just sit and exist and not feel pressured to do or work or make. Rekindle your energy and your most foundational desires. Remember the dreams you had as a kid, the real ones — not just what you wanted to be when you grew up. Reconnect with Nature which can be such a source of solace and comfort. Learn from her, she works in cyclical patterns, and things cannot be bad or difficult forever. Buy local as much as you can — not just food, but other things, too. Treat people around you with kindness and, above all, take care of yourselves. Humans are not the virus, it is the political and economical structures that have been killing us, slowly for years. The virus just brought it to light.
> 
> Let's start something different, let's shed what has been destroying us like dead skin. 
> 
> Let's become something beautiful, right now.
> 
> I love you guys. Take care.
> 
> __
> 
> Come hang out with me on tumblr, if you want!  
> [ **liminalweirdo**](https://liminalweirdo.tumblr.com/)


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